The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is hitting the road! In celebration of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday they’ve come over to the United States with plans to sit in on 14 different Shakespeare festivals over the summer.

In my neck of the woods they’ll be coming to Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass on August 17.  Of course I’ve already got plans that weekend :(. Why can’t I learn about these things months in advance?  And why can’t they come into Boston instead? I’m 20 minutes from Boston, I’m over 2 hours from Lenox!

I’m a big fan of Netflix’s original series, both House of Cards and Orange is the new Black. Kevin Spacey, star of the former, has been on all the talk shows saying how it is basically Richard III. Well, more to the point how he based his character on R3.

So when I saw this piece on why you need to read Shakespeare to understand Orange Is The New Black (or OITNB for short) new (second) season, I was all over it.  The idea put forth (using Macbeth as an example) is that in Shakespeare’s world, there is a natural order to things. When something comes in to disrupt that natural order, there is chaos while the world attempts to correct itself and restore order.  That is season 2 in a nutshell, and I agree completely with the article’s argument.

WARNING – that article is 100% spoilers. You’d better finish season 2 before you read it.

Too easy. 

When I spotted a reference in one of my news items suggesting that the mayor’s story was Shakespearean, I thought “Oh this will be good, somebody’s actually going to argue about how tragic the whole thing is.”  Nah, they just went with the big jolly drunk angle.

That’s not to say there’s not some smirks to be had in the article:

“Falstaff from Shakespeare,” McCaig said in a telephone interview. “He’s very Shakespearean or operatic. He’s our modern tragic hero…”  They do know that Falstaff isn’t a tragic hero, right?

“It’s a timeless story. Actually, it’s been written 100 times — it’s this rise to greatness and then a huge, huge fall due to your own weaknesses. God, this story has been written 100 years ago, you know what I mean?”  Sure, absolutely, written 100 years ago.  That’s why you earlier compared it to Shakespeare, who was writing 450 years ago.

All in all, the musical looks like an even better train wreck than its subject.

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.