When asked about my favorite plays I tend to mention Hamlet and HAIR in the same sentence. Bonus points if you already knew that there’s loads of Shakespeare references in HAIR anyway :).

So you just know that I’m going to post this link about a musical version of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” written by John Guare (“The House of Blue Leaves) and Galt McDermott (“HAIR”). It was actually written back in 1971 and it’s come back to New York.

Here’s trivia. The most obvious Shakespeare reference in HAIR is the whole “What a piece of work is man” song, which is lifted verbatim from Hamlet. Ok, not verbatim, since it starts out with “I have of late…” which is technically in the middle of the speech. Additionally, just before “Let the Sunshine In” the chorus is singing “The rest is silence….the rest is silence…..” over and over again, also from Hamlet.

There’s a really good third reference as well, and it’s not from Hamlet. Who knows it?

Here’s a fun one. If you’re involved in any upcoming Shakespeare performances and need some tips on costume creation/maintenance, Sarah Lorraine Goodman has her Elizabethan Costumer’s Guide to Home Depot for you. I have to admit I have no knowledge of the topic at all so I don’t know if her advice is any good, but I think it’s a neat connection to make. I especially love the idea of a bunch of people in costume wandering the aisles looking for plastic zip ties because their corsets need reboning.

I’m not quite sure why this article teaches the basics of investing using Shakespeare characters, but it does. In particular the story is Shakespeare gathering his characters and informing them that he was hoping his latest stock would go up and it didn’t. So they all chime in on other factors that might be at work.

Anybody a fan of fan fiction? That’s when somebody takes the characters from a well-known story and runs off with them in some other direction. It’s particularly huge in the Star Trek universe, although Shakespeare has also gotten the treatment. I personally started one called “Ophelia’s Song”, which had the premise that Ophelia and Hamlet were plotting everything together, until Hamlet went overboard and killed her dad causing her to go nuts. I never finished it.