“Choose Your Own Adventure” Shakespeare is not new.  But what if you hooked up the audience to actual emotional sensors that tracked how they were responding, and then “conducted” the performance behind the scenes so they didn’t know how they were affecting the outcome?

Such is the experiment of Conducting Shakespeare, where several audience members will be connected to devices to measure their brain-waves, heart rate and so forth. The director/conductor, Dr. Alexis Kirke, will use the information in real time to splice together a sort of medley of Shakespeare scenes to create something that would, in theory, be different for every audience.

I love the idea, and would want to play along. I do have two thoughts on the subject.

First, it says that “4 out of 100” audience members will be connected up to the sensors, which I’m sure is a technology/budgetary consideration, and that’s fine. But that means that those 4 people are going to get a better show than the other 96, who might be on the opposite end of the scale when it comes to what they’re looking at.

Second, you may not like what you think you like. Funny coincidence, the mrs. and I were watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy recently where they’re doing this story arc about brain research. They connected some regular characters up to a machine that would monitor brain/emotional activity, then showed them pictures.  “Want to see the pleasure center?” asks the neural surgeon.  “Show her the picture of the kitten.”  Up comes the picture of the kitten, and all the anger zones fire in the brain.  “What, you don’t like cats?” he asks.  “Hate ’em,” she replies.

That’s what I’m imagining in a performance like this.  Your subject may have come in thinking “Woo! Hamlet! Greatest work of literature in the English language!” but in reality his brain is saying “Snore. I don’t understand a word of this.  This needs more twins, mistaken identity and girls dressed up as boys.”

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North Attleboro, MA si maybe 30-40 minutes from my house. Wondering how this escaped me for so long!

North Attleboro Middle School students turned the tragedy of “Macbeth” into something fun for the school’s annual Shakespeare Festival. 

Eighth-graders used William Shakespeare’s famous play as the foundation for projects ranging from board games to children’s books.

[Link] It was the “board games and children’s books” that caught my attention. I would love it if my kids got to partake in something like this!

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From opera to Disney, people have been putting Shakespeare to music for a very long time.

When I saw an article titled The 10 best Shakespeare-inspired pieces of music – in pictures I was assuming that they meant songs. Albums.  Individual short pieces.  Wasn’t sure where the pictures part came in.

Now I know! They’re talking about full-length musicals of all sorts – Broadway, opera, film – that feature Shakespeare’s work.  Sure they included Lion King, but there’s also several operas and classical pieces.

Like many of these lists I find it amusing how they struggle to fill their quota and get more liberal in the interpretation of their premise.  For instance … the soundtrack to Olivier’s Henry V makes the list. Just about every other entry on the list involves taking the actual words of Shakespeare (or their modern interpretation) and setting them to music.  Not this one, this one is the background music playing while Shakespeare goes about its business in the foreground.  But still….”Shakespeare inspired” it is.

Don’t miss the ridiculously random Elvis Costello cameo!

This year’s Shakespeare posting marathon is sponsored by “Shakespeare is Universal.” Help us prove that Shakespeare makes life better. Buy a t-shirt and support cancer research.

Like all great lists of Shakespeare trivia, most of the regular Shakespeare Geek readers are already going to know all of these Macbeth Fun Facts. Like the fact that James I was a fan of witches. Or that Macbeth was a real person.

But …

3. In Shakespeare’s day, females were prohibited from acting in plays and were always portrayed by young men. During “Macbeth’s” initial run, a rumor was circulating that the boy playing Lady MacBeth had died and Shakespeare himself took his place.