Your Favorite Hamlet

~ duane ~ 1 Comment
As far as I know, Sir Ian’s version is not available on video.

So at work the other day, my CEO asked which Hamlet was my favorite.  At the time, in context, I assumed that he meant film version, as in, something that other people could then go watch.  Not a live production that, if you missed it, telling somebody that it was your favorite didn’t serve much purpose because they couldn’t go take advantage of that information.

I decided to ask the question on Twitter.  I had no idea I’d get the kind of response.  Taking out the people who pretended not to understand the question (answering with the names of cozy little villages, or “Q1”, etc..), I still got over 20 different Hamlets to choose from.  Not all of them are available on video, but that’s been changing lately with live broadcasts of many.

For the record I’d not even heard several of these names, but was happy to discover them.  Some performances are even on YouTube in full!

One Vote

Papaa Essiedu (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2016)

Oscar Isaac (The Public Theatre, 2017)

Andrew Scott (Almeida Theatre, 2017)

Campbell Scott (2000)

Adrian Lester (2002 directed by Peter Brook)

Tom Hiddleston (2017, as directed by Kenneth Branagh)

Richard Chamberlain (Hallmark Hall of Fame, 1970)

Ruth Negga  (coming in late 2018)

Two Votes

Derek Jacobi (1980)

Mark Rylance (1989).

Coming in Second, with Four Votes

Kenneth Branagh (1996) comes in with 4 votes,

Our Winner, with Six Votes is …

David Tennant (RSC 2009)!

Did you get to vote?  Who is your pick?  For the record, I told me CEO Branagh was my choice because as I said I was limiting myself to film versions I thought he might have a chance of seeing if he wanted to. I wasn’t going to give it to Mel Gibson or Ethan Hawke, the other two that leaped immediately to mind.  At the time I didn’t even think of Tennant, but on reflection I think I’d still keep my choice as Branagh. I found Tennant’s a little too … hyper?  OCD?  Can’t remember the words I used at the time.  But then we start to get into a debate about whether we’re talking about the movie as a whole, or about the character.  It’s probably true that Tennant’s Hamlet character was better than Branagh’s, but I like Branagh’s movie better as a whole.

(No love for Kevin Kline (1990), I notice.  I wonder if people simply never saw it?)

 

My Poor Fool Is Hang’d

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Let’s talk about King Lear for a second, since I’m in the middle of watching a new production (that I’ll be posting about shortly).

We all know the deal with Fool.  He disappears halfway through the play. There’s that one line “my poor fool is hang’d” at the end.  It’s generally interpreted that Cordelia / Fool were doubled, and that Lear, who is sitting before Cordelia’s hanged corpse, is referring to her as his fool.

That leaves it up to the director.  Many interpretations show the actual death of the character, presumably to give the audience some closure (“Wait, the fool was hanged? When was that, I missed it!”)  Isn’t it the McKellen version that shows Fool left behind, surrounded by enemy soldiers, and hanged right there on screen?  Not a fan of that scene.

I know a production where Gloucester and Kent forget about Fool when they take Lear, leaving him to die in the storm.  Between the two I think I like that ending better.  The former has an element of “humanity is deliberately violent toward each other. The latter is more “humanity can too easily forget each other.”

How else have you seen it done?  Do you prefer to leave it the way Shakespeare wrote it, with no resolution to Fool’s fate?

Book Review : Macdeath by Cindy Brown

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I’m always torn when people offer to send me books for possible review.  If it’s not an audiobook or ebook, it goes on the bottom of the “get to when neither of those is available” list. That’s just the way my schedule works. As such, it takes me forever. Such is the case with Cindy Brown’s Macdeath, which I’ve had so long I can’t remember when I got my copy.  But I’m happy to say I finished it!

Book one of a series, Macdeath introduces us to Ivy Meadows, a struggling actress / part-time detective (thanks to her Uncle Bob, a full-time detective). Ivy’s been cast as one of the witches in Macbeth, and we all know that the Scottish play is cursed.  Sure enough, somebody winds up dead. Now Ivy can’t seem to stop investigating whodunnit, despite the pleas and flat-out demands of her coworkers, the police, and her detective uncle.

Maybe if I was a backstage theatre geek I would have liked this one more, since that’s where most of the action takes place. I just couldn’t get into any of the characters. None of them are around long enough or described deeply enough to care about. Which, granted, is part of the point of a murder mystery because you need to keep guessing about who the murderer is.  But without that, I was stuck in the head of our narrator, and as a 50yr old husband and father with stuff on my to-do list, I felt exactly as comfortable with that as I would have hanging out in real life with a 20something struggling actress :).  Oh, your costume is too tight in the crotch?  You’re not sure if you have enough money to get your car out of the parking lot?  The struggle is real, people.

There’s plenty of twists to the story, a couple of dead ends, and a reasonably satisfying ending (as these things go).  A cast of characters has been introduced, and there’s obvious room for a series.

Know what it reminded me of?  Once upon a time, there was a golden age of television where it seems like everything was a detective show.  Magnum P.I., Murder She Wrote, Matlock, Remington Steele, Hart to Hart, Miami Vice, Charlie’s Angels, Simon and Simon …  This book reminded me a great deal of those.  Imagine a Charlie’s Angels episode where one of the girls has to go undercover in a production of Macbeth.  You get a very brief glimpse at the cast of characters, she runs around trying to uncover clues even though everybody tells her not to (because she can’t blow her cover), and all the while she still has to remember her lines and go perform when her cue comes.  Then when their allotted hour of tv time is up the bad guy is revealed, the day is saved, and everything wraps up nicely until next week.

That’s not a bad thing. There’s a reason why they made so many of those shows, and some of them did very well (Murder She Wrote went for 12 seasons!)  But the strength of each of those shows was in the main character, and finding an audience that connected with that character.   Just because I’m not the audience for Ivy Meadows doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

P.S. Just one more thing before I go?  We all know that Shakespeare was a master of the dirty double entendre, whether Hamlet’s putting his head in Ophelia’s lap or Mercutio’s got his hands upon the very prick of noon.  I’ve got people regularly telling me that Shakespeare itself is a euphemism for something (as is “will”, come to think of it).  The author chose to have one of her characters named … are you ready for this?  Detective Pinkstaff.  Yikes.  Every time that character was in the scene I couldn’t take him seriously, not because he was a bad character, but because he was a walking phallic joke.  At least she didn’t make him the love interest.

 

 

 

Prince of Cats of Denmark

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

You never know where you’ll find a Shakespeare story.

I listen to podcasts at work.  Everybody has their own personal style for what they like – educational, informative, short, long, etc…  I’ve found that I’m a big fan of the NPR “shows” more than the news. Stuff like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, for example.

When you listen to those shows long enough you start to find your favorite guests and realize that you can follow them to other podcasts. Such is the case with Paula Poundstone. I remember watching her do standup years ago, and now I enjoy opportunities to listen to her take on the world around her.  Not so much with the technology. Lots of cats.

I recently discovered that she’s got a new podcast along with Adam Felber (also a Wait, Wait regular) called Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone. It’s fun. Adam asks Paula for her advice on a topic, then they bring in an expert to discuss whether that was good advice.  It’s fun and educational.

Anyway, this isn’t a big advertisement for their podcast.  I was listening to an episode about cats and Adam mentioned that his cat was named, “Horatio.”  I wondered if that was a Hamlet reference.  So why not ask? He’s on Twitter, as is Paula.

I asked, “@adamfelber is your cat named Horatio a Hamlet reference?  Just heard it mentioned on @paulapoundstone’s new podcast and had to ask.”

And back came the reply! Actually several, which I’ll paste together here.

Brooklyn, 1997.  As I was having breakfast in the tiny yard behind our ground floor apartment, three newborn kittens and their mom poked their heads through a hole in the fence and tumbled in…

They hung around and over the next couple of weeks we got to know them. One of them seemed really conflicted and unsure whether to trust us humans or not, so we started calling him Hamlet.

Naturally, the one who seemed outright hostile became Laertes. The mom cat was Gertrude…

…and the sweet, friendly, reliable kitten became Horatio.

(We subsequently met Claudius and learned that Hamlet was in fact Ophelia!)

We took Horatio in soon after that, and he lived with us happily for the next 20 years – like his namesake, the only apparent survivor of that troubled family.

Alas, Horatio has passed on to that undiscovered country from which no feline returns, sung to his rest by flights of mousey angels.  But Adam posted a picture! Can cats be good boys?  He looks like he was a good boy. I love that “really conflicted” (in a cat, no less) makes some people think, “We should name him Hamlet.”

I have no pictures of cats on file, so please enjoy young Sir Ian.

This story is posted with Adam’s permission. I thought it would be a fun reminder that if you think you see a Shakespeare reference in the wild, go chase it down!  You might be right. And you might get introduced to some fun new people.  Thanks, Adam!  Go check out his new show.

Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Titus

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

This morning in the car we heard an NPR story about the most popular musicals to perform in high school.  My daughter found the list on her phone and asked me to guess some. I said, “Well it’s musicals so I won’t bother guessing any Shakespeare.”

“That’s the other list,” she told me. Suddenly I was interested.

Alas it’s not “Most Popular Shakespeare” but I love that some Shakespeare made it to the top overall list!

How do you think other Shakespeare plays ranked?  Which play would be next on the list and just didn’t make the cut?  A tragedy or a comedy?  Maybe Comedy of Errors, because it’s easy to produce?

Also, I must be out of the loop because I don’t recognize several of these, at all.  Almost, Maine?  Though if somebody tells me that Radium Girls is about Marie Curie (and women in science in general) then I’ll be very pleased.  I am assuming that somewhere along the line 12 Angry Men turned into 12 Angry Jurors so that they could more easily cast female roles?