Take a story about mental illness and psycho-pharmacology, add a rock musical score, throw in some family drama, and a lot of heart and you’ll have “Next to Normal”. (It also won three Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize.) Southern Rep is about to open it’s take on Next to Normal. I was at the preview […]
New Orleans has left its mark. In nine months, I’ve taken three writing seminars, read twenty plays (half of them Shakespeare), written two of my own, and seen over three dozen on-stage (including the shorter works at the Fringe Festival). I’ve written some academic research papers, had a play published, attended a few poetry readings, […]
I thought I was done Shakes-blogging for a while, but the UNO theatre department is producing The Taming of the Shrew this week and so I had to check it out. This is not my favorite show, by any stretch, but I figured I should try and give it the benefit of the doubt. The […]
Tradition has it that the A/V guys (and they’re always guys) are the nerds on campus, amirite? The guys so into electronics that it’s their pleasure to reboot computers, hook up projectors and the like? We had a serious case of nerd failure today in my Shakespeare class. The professor wanted to show some scenes […]
In, The Tempest, William Shakespeare introduces the character Prospero as a magus, an adept at occult, but white, magic. In creating this character, Shakespeare drew on several real people living in the late 16th century. The first of these is the Welsh mathematician and astronomer, John Dee. Dee had served as astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, […]
April 23 is Shakespeare’s birthday. Probably. We do know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564, which would make him 449 today. He died on April 23, 1616, which is the real reason that his birthday is also celebrated today. People liked the idea that he was born and died on the same day. […]
Robert Greene was an Elizabethan writer and dramatist. He’s little known today except for a short pamphlet he wrote right before his death in which he disparaged William Shakespeare as “an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers, … with his Tygres heart wrapt in a player’s hyde”. Now Greene considered Shakespeare an upstart because he […]
