(This post has very little to do with Shakespeare.)
May 4th is commonly known as “Star Wars Day”. May the Fourth be with you, get it? Anyway, occasions like this cause a spike in Twitter traffic, and it’s always fun to jump in on a meme with some Shakespeare. So BardFilm and I have gotten into the habit of trying to hijack the day’s trending topic and turn it Shakespeare. Twitter being what it is, though, it’s easy to lose track of them as they scroll off. Thus, for posterity, I’m archiving a bunch of them here. Join in the fun, either here or on Twitter!

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” – Macbeth
“Be or be not…there is no question.”
“Always two there are, a Rosencrantz and a Guildenstern.”
“Mercutio drew first!” Come on, you didn’t think I was going to let Star Wars Day go by without a plug, did you? 🙂
“Wonderful girl. Either I’m going to kill her or I’m beginning to like her.” – Han Benedick

“I think my eyes are getting better. Instead of a big dark blur, I see a big light blur.” – Han Gloucester

“Mudhole? Slimy? My home this is! Poor Yoda’s a-cold…” – Yoda O’Bedlam

“Kiss me, Kate!” “I’d just as soon kiss a wookie.” “I can arrange that!” – Petruchio Solo in “Taming of the Shrew Princess”

“We fail? I find your lack of faith disturbing.” -Lady MacVader

“Harry, mah bukee, keel-ee caleya ku kah. Wanta dah moole-rah? Wonkee chee sa crispa con Hotspur?” – Falstaff the Hutt
“Joined the dark side Macbeth has, Mmmm. Lies, deceit, creating mistrust are his ways now.”
“Elsinore. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” – Fortinbras
“Lent me must your ears be, before bury Caesar I can.”
“Luke, I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night.”
“I used to bull’s-eye whomp-rats in my T-16 back home; that’s not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door.”
“Fighting the Battle of Agincourt ain’t like dusting crops, boy.”
“C3P0: Sir, the possibility of winning the battle of Agincourt is approximately 3,720 to 1. Hal Solo: Never tell me the odds. “

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, it was the winter of our discontent.”

Just one of those things you’ll overhear at my house. In this case it came out of my son, who turns 5 tomorrow, after some logic of his that went, “When you die you go to Heaven. People in Heaven are angels. Shakespeare died, therefore Shakespeare is in Heaven, therefore Shakespeare must be an angel.”

Six actors have memorized all the roles. YOU choose which part they’ll play.

Such is the pitch sent to me by Folding Chair Classical Theatre, which I’ve included below. This could be interesting. I’ve been watching a bunch of improv lately, and it sounds to me like a similar sort of thing. “Ok, freeze! We’re about to see the entrance of the King and Queen of the fairies. Who should play Oberon? You, sir, blue shirt in the third row, which of these actors should play Oberon?” Although that does make me want to add “And now give me a style of movie he should play it in, style of movie….anyone….film noir! I heard film noir. Ok, Oberon, you enter in the style of film noir.” 🙂
Folding Chair Classical Theatre presents

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by William Shakespeare

Six actors have memorized all the roles. YOU choose which part they’ll play.

Tickets $18 for all performances at www.SmartTix.com or call 212-868-4444

Folding Chair Classical Theatre takes Shakespeare’s comedy of magical transformation to hilarious extremes as our highly-trained six-member ensemble takes on all 21 roles in a madcap, fairy-populated, magic-filled slumber party.

But just to keep things interesting, the company will not know which set of roles they will be playing that night until right before curtain time. Each performance promises a different fairy queen in love with different ass-headed weaver, as lovers woo and fairies fight (and some guys just want to rehearse in peace) in all sorts of new combinations, to the stylings of a psyche-funkadelic score. Which casting will you see? We have no idea.

Director Marcus Geduld and Folding Chair Classical Theatre return to Shakespeare with the small-cast, big-adventure aesthetic they brought to acclaimed productions of “Pericles,” “Cymbeline,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Winter’s Tale”. Join us for the magic!

Performances May 5-June 4, Thurs.-Sat. at 8PM, Sun at 2PM.Extra performance June 4 at 2PM.No performance May 8, 27, 28, or 29.At Access Theatre, 380 Broadway between Walker and White Street.

Tickets only $18. Click here to order or call 212-868-4444

…Let’s Fall In Love
I want to get back to something for a minute. Lost in the shuffle of last week’s Shakespeare Day celebrations was a new effort by our own BardFilm (aka KJ), where he rewrote Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love)” using all of Shakespeare’s favorite couples (and then some!) Not only did KJ write this, he sings it as well, and put together a video. It’s over 8 minutes long!

That is no small effort, and I wanted to make sure that everybody did get a chance to see it. You may not have a chance to watch the *whole* thing, I mean come on KJ, some of us have day jobs 🙂 … but you can always bookmark it and tell yourself you’ll watch it later.
Go watch! I’m deliberately not embedding the YouTube video because it’s only fair that he should get the traffic.
Nice work, K. It is appreciated!

We’ve mentioned Wordle, the engine that turns any stream of text into an artistic tag cloud, a few times in the past. And people have been throwing Shakespeare at it for as long as it’s been around.

But for the geeky among us, C. Laprade over at In The Web Of It went a different way. He put Hamlet in – in all its different forms. Q1, Q2, F1. And then he compared the clouds. Before you look, what would you find more interesting – their similarities, or their differences? Or are they all just slices of the one whole that is Hamlet?
Reminds me a bit a project of my own 🙂UPDATE: I had an idea, and made one of my own for King Lear. Here I took just the lines of spoken text – no stage directions, and no speaking characters’ names. So if somebody said “Hey Cordelia!” that would be included, but her response would just be “What?” rather than “CORDELIA What?” See what I mean? So it gets rid of the syntax that artificially inflates whoever has the most spoken lines.

See anything interesting? I like that “father” and “know” pop out so clearly, and if you look to the left you’ll see “daughter” right there as well.