Watching Glee with the kids. For those that don’t recognize it or don’t watch, Glee is one of the most popular shows on tv right now due mostly to the tie-in to the iPod generation. It’s the story of, well, a Glee club. So every episode is a bunch of modern cover songs (just showed the kids the Lady Gaga episode), anchoring a terribly stereotyped high school soap opera. (Seriously, it’s awful. When it first came on I couldn’t finish an episode, until I realized it’s *supposed* to be bad, and then it got entertaining. God I hope it’s supposed to be bad…?) Anyway, every week you’ll find that whatever song the Glee kids sing rapidly climbs to the top of the iTunes download charts, raking in a dollar or so with every download. It’s genius. Everybody loves a good spin-off, right? I want to take this exact same formula and make Bard, about the drama club instead of the glee club. The show works, exactly the same way – every week a theme, a lesson for the kids to learn, and 3 or 4 anchoring “bits” from the source material that show the lesson. Instead of Gaga week, they have, I dunno, Taming of the Shrew week. Instead of MP3 files on iTunes, you get video clips. Just dreaming, I know. But I’d love such a show. The whole gimmick is that the stereotype for Glee club is that it’s for losers, and the show will change that. Well, show the drama geeks some love too, huh? (*) For those that have no idea what we’re talking about, the L in the Glee logo is actually a hand making the letter, the universal symbol for “loser”. I needed something to mimic that, and it’s the best I could come up with :).
You should film it yourself for youtube. Or bring the idea to a theater that does Shakespeare with teens and have them film it. I think it could take off. (I'm not sure about the 4 in B4RD though.)
It's supposed to be campy and silly and exaggerated, if that's what you mean by "bad". 🙂 (The scenes with Kurt – the gay kid – and his dad are, though, frequently quite moving.)
I love the idea! They could use scenes that correlate with the plotline: a couple could act out Romeo and Juliet (or, depending on the personalities, Beatrice and Benedick). A pair in a fight could be Brutus and Cassius in 4.2 of Julius Caesar, and in the process reconcile. A shy girl could play Macbeth as a confidence-building exercise. They could break barriers of age and gender, get to the heart of the stories and characters and discover how human they are. I love it!
PS. If you ever watch the Season 1 finale (the episode is called "Regionals"), there's a nice little Shakespeare reference at the end. 😉
🙂 Thanks Darren. The 4 in B4RD isn't necessary, I was just going for gimmicky to get people's attention :).
(In case this is not widely known, by the way, that's supposed to be an A. The 4 for A replacement is part of an online invention often referred to as "leet speak" where several letters swap for numbers = 1 for l, 3 for E, 7 for T and so on. "LEET", famously, is 1337.)
I'm also just realizing that just yesterday, Lifehacker ran a story about how you can still get a 4-letter domain name if you just swap out a letter for a number, and I remember thinking "b4rd" is the one I'd use. Has no conscious connection to this story, though. Just funny timing.