Ok, maybe The Brady Bunch isn’t popular around the world, but here in the United States it’s firmly ingrained into our pop culture subconscious. Mom always said, don’t play ball in the house. Anyway, anybody with a little trivial knowledge of the show has probably heard that Robert Reed, who played the dad, hated the show. He fancied himself a serious actor and would often refuse to play certain scenes if he didn’t like the way they were written. What I didn’t know was that he was in the habit of writing lengthy memos to the producer detailing what he didn’t like about them. And the best part? He actually uses Shakespeare as the foundation of his argument. In the linked memo he ultimately is complaining about an episode in which Bobby, the younger boy, has sold some weird “hair tonic” to Greg, the older boy – and it turned Greg’s hair green. So naturally, Reed makes the connection to Hamlet: Their dramatis personae are noninterchangable. For example, Hamlet, archtypical of the dramatic character, could not be written into Midsummer Night’s Dream and still retain his identity. Ophelia could not play a scene with Titania; Richard II could not be found in Twelfth Night. In other words, a character indigenous to one style of the theatre cannot function in any of the other styles. In the quoted site (TVSquad) I’ve already brought up Falstaff, though perhaps that is not the best venue to discuss it. 🙂
