Summer is the season of Shakespeare in the park, and I can’t possibly write about all the stories that come across my newsfeed. However, I wanted to give a special shout out to this Rochester production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Haggerty describes this “Midsummer Night’s Dream” production as “history-making.” A senior lecturer in the theater department at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Haggerty is directing the play with a double cast of hearing and deaf actors — 33 people in all. Each role is played by a voicing actor, who has a signing (American Sign Language) actor assigned to him or her. So there are two languages in use onstage simultaneously: Shakespeare’s, and American Sign Language.

While I certainly think that this is a step beyond “have a translator standing at the edge of the stage”, I think this is the more “history making” part:

The fairy characters communicate in sign language, because they cannot speak to the human characters. But they do sign to one another what it is that the humans are saying. Among themselves, the fairies sign to each other, and voiced actors reenact what the fairies are thinking and signing for the audience.

So then if I understand it correctly, the sign language translation is actually performed by the fairies (who, presumably, are going to be onstage throughout the play)?  And that the fairies’ lines will be signed first, and then “translated” into speech by the other actors?  I love how that idea equalizes the two languages.

For more information: http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/a-midsummer-nights-dream/Content?oid=2402655 

Julie Taymor is about to bring us more Shakespeare. She’s finished filming her stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and hopes to show it off at the Toronto Film Festival (which is where we got our first look at Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, if you recall).

Thoughts? I hear the stage version was quite good. I guess this will be like Christopher Plummer’s Tempest or Sir Ian’s King Lear? She says that we’ll see the audience, all the special effects will be live as they were on stage, and so on.

I’ve only ever seen parts of her Titus. I think that her Tempest has grown on me over the years, even though I was initially quite disappointed in it.  I’m anxious to see what she does with Dream.

Is Shakespeare to blame for the negative connotations of skin disease?

No, of course not, it’s a silly pseudo-scientific question that doesn’t deserve a response. But that is apparently the quality of paper being presented to the British Association of Dermatologists these days.  The logic goes like this:  Shakespeare had characters insulting each other based on their complexion, therefore *his* success has led to the perpetuation of negativity toward skin disease.”

Luckily, the article takes this “research” about as seriously as I do:

“Has any writer in history ever suggested that the symptoms of skin disease are attractive? And have audiences for the last 400 years really been coming out of theatres saying ‘Ah yes – I’d nearly forgotten – pox is to be avoided. What a genius Shakespeare was!’ Next week: has the fairy tale of Snow White been creating a misleadingly favourable impression of dwarfism?”

In other news, Shakespeare’s popularity is also responsible for cross-dressing, bed-tricks and the occasional regicide.