Just spotted an interesting question over on Yahoo! Answers, and I think that my crowd over here could generate some interesting content on the subject.

Say that you’ve got no real acting experience – you’re not part of a group, never done this sort of thing before.  You and a bunch of friends get together and say “Hey, let’s perform some Shakespeare.”

What happens next? What’s the checklist?  I’m curious now, since I think there’s people in the crowd that may have done exactly this.

What sort of permissions do you need to get?  Even if you just wanted to head on into the town common and start reciting, who has to ok that?  What limits and rules are there?  Is it usually standardized, i.e. you’d be able to find the person at town hall who knows what to tell you, rather than scratching their head at the crazy person asking things no one has ever asked?

What about choosing a text?  If I own, say, the Norton version – can I just head to the photocopier and make a dozen copies of Midsummer to pass out?  (I know the answer to that one, but I want somebody to give me the “right” answer.)

What else?  What details would somebody doing this for the first time miss, that from experience you can tell us?

Saw this one go by on Twitter, and it didn’t take long to discover that it was said in 2007 by Richard Phillips, right here.  I don’t know who Rick Phillips is – some sort of pastor/priest?

You know you’re a Shakespeare Geek when..

…you hear somebody tell the joke about “you’re so old you dated Shakespeare’s sister” and you think, “Which sister?”

I know that Fonzie played Hamlet, and Henry Winkler played Scrooge, but until this moment I’d never heard a peep about 1977’s Henry Winkler Meets William Shakespeare.

It appears to have been part of something called The CBS Festival of Lively Arts for Young People. 

Look at the cast — Kevin Kline as Petruchio?! This would have been one of his earliest television roles.

Challenge extended, Bardfilm – find us some footage!

Fans of Two Gentlemen of Verona cover your ears, because this reviewer has no kind words for Shakespeare’s “weakest, deeply weird” ending.  That’s ok, though, because Amanda Dehnert has gone ahead and rewritten it.  Her Verona Project “transforms Shakespeare’s shallow, nonsensical play into a joyous and affecting story of flawed people stumbling into love.”

I don’t often blog about individual local shows, because most folks simply won’t ever have the chance to see them. But the amount of scorn heaped on poor Two Gents in this review made me figure that perhaps there are some fans of that one who might like to defend it?