Imagine, for a moment, an Oberon and Titania who live in modern day San Francisco. Oh, they’re still king and queen of the fairies, still magical creatures. But, just like mortals, they have their flaws. They fight, they make up. After one particular fight, Oberon brings Boy to Titania as a peace offering. This is not new, the fairies often snatch young boys from the surrounding neighborhood and bring them to live “under the hill” for a time. Not as equals, of course. As toys. And, when they’re bored of their toys, they throw them back.
Something is different about this one, though. This one is not a toy. This boy they treat as a son. Titania deeply loves the boy, an emotion that is also deeply foreign to her (and she does not always like or appreciate it). Sometimes she can not live without him, other times she curses Oberon for ever bringing him to her.
Something else is different about Boy — he has leukemia. What happens to Titania and Oberon next is some of the saddest fiction I think I’ve ever read. The author’s descriptions of parents inside a hospital cancer ward as so realistic you feel like you’re right there with them (and it is not a place you want to be for long). This only stands to reason since Chris Adrian, author of The Great Night, is in real life a pediatric oncologist. So he, however unfortunately, knows all too much about this area.
I’m three paragraphs in, and that’s just the premise for the story. I could take a whole novel of that. “Titania and Oberon living in modern day San Francisco. They kidnap a boy, learn what it means to love him and to be parents, and then have to deal with his mortality as leukemia takes him away. Boom. Go.” I would buy that book.

But this book is more than that. This book is Adrian’s retelling of Shakespeare’s entire story, with a few twists. Oberon, after a particularly horrible fight with Titania (who blames him for all of their pain), has left. Titania desperaretly wants him to return and sends her fairy servants out in search of him daily. In this story, though, Puck is not a mischievous sprite – he is an untrustworthy creature who spends his time in chains. Puck is able to convince Titania, in her grief, that he will surely find Oberon if only she unchains him. She does so and we discover what the other fairies already knew – that Puck is a world-eating monster. The rest of the story is spent with the fairies alternately running away, attempting to fight, or basically kissing their fairy behinds goodbye because the end of the world is surely upon them.
Meanwhile, up in the human world, three distraught lovers have become lost in the park. Each has his (or her) own backstory about how love, sex and relationships have gone horribly wrong. It doesn’t take long for these mortals to run into the fairies, and they all flee from Puck together.
But wait, there’s more! What of Bottom and the mechanicals? Here we get a band of homeless people who have become convinced that the Mayor is solving the city’s homeless problem with cannibalism. So, naturally, they decide to stage a musical retelling of Soylent Green, the old science fiction movie about the same topic.
How does it all end? Well, with lots of sex, I’ll say that. I don’t know if that’s a statement that the author’s making about Midsummer or about San Francisco, but he certainly doesn’t need any double entendres or innuendos to make his point.   
The story is not an exact retelling of Midsummer, and doesn’t try to be, as you can see. Ultimately, I found that I liked the Shakespeare bits and didn’t care much one way or another for the rest. Like I said, I would have read an entire story of nothing but the backstory about Titania, Oberon and Boy. Or how Puck had come to be captured, I’m sure that would make a good story as well. It’s just that, when you start adding characters to Shakespeare, you lose me a bit as your audience. I’m in it for the Shakespeare, and coming at it from the angle of what you do with the Shakespeare. When you take some Shakespeare out and add some of your own creation back in? Well, now you’ve basically asked me to put the two side by side … and I’m not sure what modern author would win that battle.
Chris Adrian was named as part of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” and, as mentioned, is currently in his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at UCSF. This is his third novel.

I love a good puzzle. Even got dragged to one of those puzzler’s league conventions, once. And everything’s better with Shakespeare, right? (Seems like there’s a Bacon joke in there somewhere.)

Whenever Andrews McMeel Publishing asked me if I wanted to review a Shakespeare puzzle book from The Puzzle Society, I got all excited. I didn’t think such a thing even existed – as a matter of fact I’d even given thought to seeing if I could piece together and distribute one myself. So I quickly said yes.

What was I expecting? I think, when I think “puzzle book”, I imagine those ubiquitous, cheapy “5000 Sudoku Puzzles!” ones you see at the supermarket checkout for a buck ninety-nine, and I think I was expecting something like that here. So imagine my pleasant surprise when out of the shipping envelope dropped a smaller book that looks exactly like a Moleskine notebook. Hard, textured cover. Strong binding. Even an embedded elastic wrapped around, to keep it closed when you’re not using it. Nice. Quality stuff, here.

The book itself is labelled as having “100 puzzles and quizzes.” What sorts of puzzles? A whole variety:

* Word searches (“Find all these words and characters from Antony and Cleopatra”, or “Find all these cliches that Shakespeare first used”) Both the traditional kind as well as “pathfinders” where each word links up to a new one and you have to find them all in a row.

* Quizzes (ranging from easy (“What did Shakespeare bequeath to his wife Anne in his will?”) to tricky (“Which is the largest female role, by line count?” Your mileage may vary.)

* Crosswords, and multiple variations – Kriss Kross, ArrowWords, etc…

* Codecrackers – one of my favorites, where you’ve got a crossword sort of puzzle where each blank has a number between 1 and 26, and you have to figure out which letter goes with which number. Do it right and spell out a Shakespeare quote.

* A variety of smaller puzzles like a jigsaw puzzle with letters on it, or “word wheels”, or word transformation games (for instance you’re given “drat” and “a light breeze”, so you add an F to get draft)

How’s the Shakespeare? As billed, every puzzle has some Shakespeare in it. I have to be honest, some seem to be phoning it in a bit more than others. A word search where every word is a Macbeth character? Cool. A traditional crossword puzzle, with traditional non-Shakespeare clues, with one little “At the end, the letters in the shaded circles will spell out a Shakespeare character” addition on the end? Not so much.

Here’s my metric for dealing with that – does my knowledge of Shakespeare in some way help me solve the puzzle? If so, then I count it as a win. For instance if I’m supposed to be guessing the name of a Shakespeare character by adding letters based on clues, but I spot right away based on the closing F that the character is Falstaff, then win. Likewise even with the word searches – there’s something exciting about spotting the word Leontes among a scramble of letters that you simply don’t feel when you find a generic word like vehicle or library. This is why I love the code cracker puzzles, because the earlier I recognize the quote, the faster I can fill in the unknown letters. I don’t know about you, but I only ever consider a puzzle done when I’ve filled in all the clues, not just when I got the “special” answer at the end.

With that metric in mind, I’m happy to report that pretty much all these puzzles succeed. The crosswords less so, for reasons described – but even there, you never know if you’re going to get a “movie based on a Shakespeare play” or “a famous actor famous for playing Shakespeare”, so there’s some challenge to it, and some level of surprise.

Downsides? Well, this is a small book. As I did several puzzles I found it very hard to keep the cover curled back and out of the way, holding the book in one hand, while still keeping it firm enough to write in. If I put it down on the table, I think the cover would constantly be trying to get in the way. And though I want to share these puzzles with my kids, the form factor really doesn’t lend itself to sharing. In a big puzzle book we could all put our heads together (literally, sometimes, complete with thunk noise :)) and everybody could do a word search. With such a small book I can maybe let me 8yr old take a crack at some puzzles by herself, but the 4yr old’s not getting his little chocolatey hands on it.

There’s also the potential issue of price. I don’t think this is out yet – the marketing copy said April 2011 – but the price printed on it is $7.99 US. I’m sitting here asking myself, if I was browsing the bookstore and spotted this in the wild, would I have scooped it up at that price? If you’re a puzzling Shakespeare fan who is going to do all the puzzles by yourself, then yes absolutely of course you do. [ While we’re on the subject, if you are in the mind to snap this one up, please consider clicking that Amazon link up there, which is an affiliate link, and helps support Shakespeare Geek. Thanks!

In my case, knowing the above family constraints, I wonder. That’s expensive for a book of puzzles that’s really just for me, not something I can share with the kids. Even though this one is 100% pure Shakespeare, they’d get more value out of one of those $1.99 cheapies at the front of the store with 500 pages in it.

Overall I’m very glad that books like this exist, and I am far happier to see this quality product (granted, at the higher price) than if I’d been handed a ninety-nine cent special that looks like a coloring book. My issue with the price could well be my own personal situation and nothing more. Know what I’d love to see, now that I think about it? Once this book is out, I’d love it if their website had online versions – even printable ones – of a bunch of the puzzles. That would cover my “sharing with the kids” issue completely. If that were the case, then all my reservations would be completely gone.

Now! Anybody know a three letter word, ends with O, Much blank About Nothing….? Hmmm…..

UPDATED  Win this book!   (Contest ends Thursday, March 10)

How do you review a movie that you’ve been waiting four years to see? My perception is drastically screwed up, I know that. Do I review it for the Shakespeare? It won’t hold up well, we already know that. Do I ignore the Shakespeare and review it as a generic kids’ movie? We all know I can’t very well do that :).

Let’s start with the Shakespeare, then, shall we? Just how much of the story is kept? For about the first half or so, it’s not bad. There’s the blue Montagues (led by mum Lady Blueberry), and the red Capulets (led by Lord Redbrick). Gnomeo is the hero of the blue team, along with his best pal “Benny” and a dog-like Shroom as their pet. There is no Mercutio character. For the red side we have Redbrick’s daughter Juliet, literally stuck up on a pedestal by her overprotective father, and troublemaker Tybalt, who thankfully is not double cast as the love interest for Juliet (like we see in Sealed With A Kiss).

There’s the inevitable demonstration of how the blues and reds dislike each other – in this case, taking the form of a lawnmower race. There’s a meeting between Gnomeo and Juliet over a rare orchid, where they’ve both disguised themselves and therefore have no idea the others…ahem…true colors. From that point they play a bit more fast and loose with the story – there’s a duel, someone gets hurt, Paris shows up to court Juliet, Gnomeo gets banished (in a way)…blah blah blah no surprise if I tell everybody they tack on a happy ending.

In between they add some characters (Tybalt has a posse? and who is this Featherstone supposed to be?), reduce the animosity between the families to a straight-up revenge story (red attacks blue, blue retaliates and attacks red, red steps it up…) and at one point I thought they were going to take a stab at explaining the history of the feud, but instead they threw in this random other love story that had nothing to do with Shakespeare’s original.

The animation is quite good – perhaps even too good? These are garden gnomes. They are made out of cement, or plaster, or whatever it is you make a gnome out of. As such they are chipped and scratched and dirty. Nice attention to detail, but… the stars of your show are chipped and scratched and dirty. You know? There’s a musical montage that shows both Gnomeo and Juliet going through a lengthy cleaning before one of their meetings, and I thought afterward we’d see them all shiny and new – nope. Best I could tell there was no change in their appearance at all.

Like all Shakespeare-ish stories, they drop in a boatload of random Shakespeare quotes and references. At the beginning I really and truly had hope for a minute when Gnomeo comes out with “Red? I hate the word…” which I recognized as a spin on Tybalt’s like “Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.” If they’d sprinkled multiple random Romeo and Juliet quotes like that throughout the play? I would have loved it.

A couple of times they try – the “neutral ground” where Gnomeo and Juliet meet is referred to as “The Old Lawrence Place” for example. But mostly it’s made painfully clear that the writer of this particular film had little more than a high school knowledge of Shakespeare – probably about a C+ knowledge, at that. The only quotes you should expect to find are the generic ones like “To be or not to be”, “Let slip the dogs of war”, and “Out damned spot.” There’s a completely random Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reference, too. There are more quotes from other plays than from Romeo and Juliet.

It’s disappointing that they reduce the story to “revenge”. I wasn’t kidding about that writer’s C+ in English. Tybalt screams it. Lady Blueberry (Romeo’s mum) screams it. Even Benny, you know, Benvolio? The peacemaker? Yeah, picture him screaming “Revenge!!!” as he charges the Capulets. It just don’t work. I don’t mean they talk about revenge, or they act in a vengeful way – I mean that each of those characters at one point or another utters the phrase “Revenge!” We get it. You think Romeo and Juliet is a revenge story. It’s not.

As for the movie itself, if we step aside from the Shakespeare a bit, I suppose it’s…. ok. It’s almost an Elton John vanity project. His songs are sprinkled in (and he even makes a cameo) with no real rhyme or reason. They named a character Benny, for Pete’s Sake, but there’s no “Benny and the Jets.” There’s a crazy amount of celebrity voices. Dolly Parton is carted out for the same old “big boobs” joke that I thought we stopped making when Johnny Carson quit the Tonight Show. Ozzy Osborne plays the part of a deer (one of Tybalt’s posse), but for no discernible reason. He’s not a personality, he’s just a voice. Hulk Hogan does a tv commercial. It’s as if (and I’m not the first reviewer to point this out), Elton called in a bunch of connections and said “Hey, do a voice for my new cartoon.” So they each phoned in a few minutes. But they add nothing to the final product. I mean, come on – there’s LADY GAGA SONG on the soundtrack! Hasn’t anybody heard what happens when that woman releases a new song? The world goes insane. It just happened this past week. But yet here’s this tiny little animated movie where she’s singing an original song, and no buzz about that at all. They could have led with that in the marketing and gotten some traction.

A quick word on the whole “Toy Story” thing. It’s not. It doesn’t even try to be. Short of 2 or 3 silly “People coming, turn back into a statue!” scenes, the real people play no part at all in this story. If the writers could have figured out a way to put together an army of garden gnomes without any humans, I’m sure they could have done it and the movie would not have changed in the least.

The funniest part of the movie, by far, is Patrick Stewart as a statue of William Shakespeare. One of the characters actually gets into a debate with Shakespeare over the relative merits of the “doomed” ending versus the happy ending. I thought Stewart must have had an absolute ball with this one as his Shakespeare joyously taunts that the story can only end tragically:

“I suppose I could have Romeo arrive in time ….nope, nope, I much prefer the both dead version.”

My kids tell me that this was their favorite part as well. Whether it’s actually the funniest part, or if it’s just because we know our Shakespeare, who knows. But it was quite welcome.

Ok, I have to wrap this up eventually. I will give credit and acknowledge that despite their silly puns, this version did not stoop to the dreaded “wherefore” means “where” joke. Phew. HOWEVER, they did commit two cardinal sins – “Shakespeare is boring” and “Our ending is better.” I suppose I just have to grit my teeth over that for the moment, because much of the audience probably agrees. But to me, making references like that clearly says that you do not have any respect (or understanding!) of the source material, and that’s a crying shame. Go ahead and make a movie based on a Shakespeare play, but do it because you love the source material and want to pay homage, not because you actually think that you can improve it. You can’t.

Should you go see it? Sure, why not. It’s got funny bits. My kids laughed, and not just at the Shakespeare. There’s nothing especially wrong with it. I just think there was a great deal of potential that went unused. They could have kept much tighter to the story and still put a happy spin on the ending. Heck, they could have gone all meta with it, like Shakespeare in Love, and played out their own story as a parallel to the superior original, rather than doing this half-and-half job they did do.

I’m brutally torn over the whole “do we want to support projects like this?” question. I want Shakespeare stories for kids. Absolutely. But if I say to support a movie like this am I putting my vote behind cannibalizing the stories as the producers see fit? Is there any chance that the success of this movie would cause somebody to say “Hey, maybe we can make another story with even more Shakespeare in it?” That, is the question.

The reviews are coming in for Gnomeo and Juliet, and it may be better than expected:

In truth the movie almost works as an Elton musical, as hits like ‘Your Song’, ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ and ‘Crocodile Rock’ are weaved into the score by composers Chris Bacon and James Newton Howard. John and partner David Furnish are producers and appear to have called in a few favours by getting their celeb chums to do the voice work (Michael Caine, Matt Lucas, Ozzy Osbourne). Director Kelly Asbury adeptly conjures up a sweet romance between the star-crossed pair Gnomeo (James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt). Blunt is particularly feisty as the girl gently rebelling against her well-meaning but overprotective father Lord Redbrick (Caine). And props to whichever of the nine hacks gave her the line “Ooh, my giddy aunt!”

I don’t get the “giddy aunt” reference.
I think this particular reviewer, who ultimately gives the movie 3 out of 5 stars, comes at it from the wrong angle. He compares it to Zeffirelli and Luhrmann, and that it is “not even close to being the definitive movie version.” Umm….YA THINK?
[ Why do I care so much about this movie? ]