This is a surprise!  “Opening Night”, which looks to be opening in early May (opposite Captain America?  It’s doomed…) tells a story we’ve heard before : drama teacher with a heart of gold has to deal with teachers who don’t understand him and administration who keeps cutting his budget, and the only way to save everybody’s eternal souls is to put on a killer Shakespeare production. Or some variation thereof.  Check it out:

For a change of pace, this one apparently also includes Shakespeare.  That’s different.

I don’t recognize any of the cast, except for Anthony “RENT” Rapp. I wonder if he’ll sing?

I can’t tell from the trailer if this is going to be Get Over It or Noises Off or Hamlet 2, but regardless I’ll almost certainly end up figuring out a way to see it.  I don’t expect it to get a wide cinema release, but maybe it’ll be streaming?

And I mean that literally. My daughter is about to start studying the play in school (she’s been doing sonnets and Shakespeare bio for the last week or two).  I’ve tried to sit down with her and look at the original text.  It’s difficult.

I’m not talking about the prologue.  I think that’s pretty self explanatory.  I mean this part:

SAMPSON 

Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals.

GREGORY 

No, for then we should be colliers.

SAMPSON 

I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.

GREGORY 

Ay, while you live, draw your neck out o’ the collar.

SAMPSON 

I strike quickly, being moved.

GREGORY 

But thou art not quickly moved to strike.

Somebody please explain to me how you open a play with the “carry coals” / “colliers” wordplay and make it interesting and entertaining to a bunch of 13yr olds, instead it being about as interesting as Shay’s Rebellion, the French and Indian War or any other number of “Trust me, you have to learn this because I said so” lessons they’re so used to?

Shortly we can get into it a bit and have fun with the “I do bite my thumb at you” scene, and the action picks up.  I’m specifically asking about the above bit.  Without simply just skipping it, or otherwise giving it ye olde “modern translation”, how do you explain why it’s there?

Well, this is amusing.  I  just googled “collier carry coals” because I wanted to get some idea of the working definition fresh in memory — and my own post is the first thing that came up!  I honestly had forgotten about that post (written in 2008!) but it’s nice to see that I’m consistent.  When explaining it to my daughter off the top of my head, I explained it now like I was apparently doing back then – this is Elizabethan “I don’t take crap from anybody” bragging to get the play started, with associated puns and wordplay to make banter out of it.

I tried to show my daughter the Zeffirelli version of the play, but it actually doesn’t start on the text. So then we went with the Luhrman version, which is closer to the text, but basically starts at “I will bite my thumb.”

So I’m curious how we’re dealing with this in the real world.  Teachers, you out there? Do we skip it?
(I’m reminded of the schoolteacher friend of mine who once told me she skips Queen Mab, but that’s a whole different sacrilege…)

Happened to hear something on NPR last night that is probably one of those, “Oh sure, everybody knows that” things, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never actually discussed it here on the blog.

Desdemona, early in the play, talking about a daughter’s obligation to her father:

DESDEMONA 

My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty:
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you; you are the lord of duty;
I am hitherto your daughter: but here’s my husband,
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.

You know what I’m going to put it up against, right?  Cordelia, early in the play, talking about a daughter’s obligation to her father:

CORDELIA 

Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

I’d never noticed how nearly identical those two speeches are.  (As the NPR host noted, Othello productions are often so focused on the Iago/Othello relationship that Desdemona comes across as a “nothing” character, and I think I’ve typically felt the same way.  And only now that I write it do I realize the irony in putting a “nothing” character up against Cordelia :))

I actually think that Desdemona scores a stronger point with “I’m only doing the exact same thing that Mom did when she married you.”

Maggie Smith as Desdemona to Sir Laurence Olivier’s Othello

Have there been other echoes of this passage in his other, even earlier works? There’s nobody really to give that speech in Macbeth or Hamlet, and I think it speaks volumes that Juliet is not in a position to deliver such a speech in her play.  What about the comedies? Neither Beatrice, Rosalind or Viola have a father figure to rebel against. I suppose Hermia might have had a shot at it, but she has to deal directly with Theseus, which isn’t really a fair comparison.

Have I  missed anybody?

Ok, so, fine, somebody managed to make a list of Shakespeare adaptations I’ve never seen.  We get back into the comfort zone with this list of Teen Shakespeare Adaptations, supposedly “ranked”, which really just means the arbitrary personal opinion of whoever made the list, based on which ones they’ve actually seen rather than just spotted a YouTube trailer.

All the standards are here – 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s The Man, Get Over It, etc…  They include Romeo+Juliet which always makes me on my soapbox about, “What did you mean by adaptation? Because some of these are original text and some of them are just storyline similar.”

Who knew that Nicholas Cage’s 1983 “Valley Girl” was a Shakespeare adaptation? I remember staying up late to watch that one on Cinemax back when cable television was new.  Now I may have to go back and watch it again since I never made the connection.  The wikipedia page tells me there’s at least some similarly beyond the “star-crossed lovers” bit, as Cage’s “R”andy meets “Julie” when he crashes a party at her house. Does that mean that “T”ommy is supposed to be the Tybalt character? Because somebody may need to read the play again, as he’s Juliet’s cousin, not her boyfriend.

Oh, and I also recall there being a reasonable amount of gratuitous nudity, which I now realize must have been an homage to Zeffirelli’s 1968 version.

It’s rare that we see a list of “Shakespeare Stuff You Didn’t Know” and we don’t already actually know most of it.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find this list of Shakespeare Adaptations You Haven’t Seen and, honestly, I haven’t seen any of them.  I’ve *heard* of several of them – Ran being the most obvious example – but I can’t say I’ve ever watched that one through from start to finish, only seen clips.

But then again I’m not the one who runs a “Shakespeare and film microblog”.  Luckily, I know who does.

Putting you on the spot here Bardfilm!  How many have you seen?