In Sunset Boulevard, the character Norma Desmond famously argues that movies don’t need words because they have faces. As a relic of the long-forgotten silent era, she was naturally inclined to such an opinion, however deluded. Ms. Desmond would most likely have major problems with a new take on one of Shakespeare’s tragedy because it takes her idea and applies it in reverse.

Radio Macbeth is much more about voices than faces. In this version, a group of actors find themselves in a dark basement in the early 1940’s. The stage is nearly empty and very dark, with three microphones which the actors use to perform Shakespeare’s tragedy of duplicity. As one member of the production describes it, they are performing Macbeth as “a ghost story told in a campfire way.” The actors are in a sense haunted by the play itself, and cell music accompanies certain scenes to heighten the eeriness.

Obviously, one of the main goals of such an approach must be to re-focus the audience’s attention on the text itself. In this anti-spectacular staging, Shakespeare’s words almost seem to emanate from a dark void. Aside from the minimalist staging, the concept seems to have tapped into something primal about Macbeth. More than many of The Bard’s other plays, this tragedy really is a ghost story. The supernatural abounds and there is also a profound air of melancholy that befits tales of the haunted. Maybe they don’t need faces after all; maybe voices will do just fine.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company is perhaps best known for its comic production The Complete Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), in which the entire Shakespearean canon is performed in less than an hour and a half. The comic send-up was penned over a decade ago and still remains incredibly popular. In fact, it probably gets more stage time than some of The Bard’s less popular titles. What may be less known is that the Reduced folks have taken on other major writings and applied their unique, condensed approach to them. One of these is The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged). The play, also written in the 1990’s, is currently being revived.

In comparing the two, some notable similarities appear, despite their wildly different source texts. In both cases, the Reduced writers are risking offense by taking works held in very high (in the Bible’s case, extremely high) esteem and mining comedy from them. Ostensibly, the humor comes less from parodying the works themselves than from the ridiculousness created by editing them so much. Furthermore, many people who read Shakespeare and the Bible have senses of humor, and kind find laughter even in something they take very seriously.

The most challenging aspect for both is dealing with the audiences’ varying levels of familiarity with the texts being abridged. While some plays and passages from the Bible are well-known enough to be considered common knowledge, a significant portion of both writings would be familiar only to those particularly devoted to the study of them. The toughtest problem for the Reduced authors to solve is how to introduce something in an abridged form.

In far-away Shakespeare news, the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre is hosting a very unique Bard-based production. Rather than tackle one of the plays and attempt to put a unique spin on it, the company has decided to create a performance piece out of the sonnet. Utilizing music, multimedia, and obviously the sonnets themselves, they have created a story about, what else, love. The sketch of a plot follows a man as he considers the merits of love over the course of an evening.

The sonnets typically are performed more in literary recitals or as part of oral interpretation exhibitions. This production seeks to celebrate another kind of The Bard’ poetry and find drama in it. In a sense, this company gets to do what so many other scholars and theatres dream about: “discover” a new Shakespeare play.

Admit it, if the news broke tomorrow that a heretofore undiscovered manuscript of Shakespeare’s had been unearthed, you would join the stampede of millions who would want to read it, produce it, study it and perform it. The KLPAC company has accomplished this somewhat indirectly. For performers the chances to tackle the sonnets are far fewer than those that involve putting the plays on their feet. For scholars who have long sought to find connectivity among the sonnets (even going so far as to attempt to unearth the subjects of The Bard’s musings), this production provides, if not an answer, then a clever reframing of the question.

Cardenio is apparently the hottest play that no one’s ever read. Back in the spring, I blogged about a new production that imagines the story in a play-within-a-play context, juxtaposing the Don Quixote-inspired plot with a modern one. Now, a different Cardenio is scheduled for production and is eschewing the historical commentary of the last version. This one is a reconstruction that hopes to be as historically accurate as possible under the circumstances. Shakespearean scholar Gary Taylor has created his text based in part on a play that is believed to be an adaptation, and was penned more than a century after the original. In essence, Taylor un-adapted it.

Ostensibly, Taylor utilizes his thorough knowledge of Shakespeare’s writing style to achieve this literary feat. The result will no doubt divide critics who may have strong feelings about both the material utilized and the method of reconstruction. In the end, is this Shakespeare’s Cardenio or Taylor’s? Truthfully, it is neither one exclusively (particularly in consideration of the fact that original was most likely a collaboration rather than an exclusively Shakespearean work).

The article made me question whether or not this method could be applied to other texts, even ones that have no connection to Shakespeare? Could we reverse-adapt a twenty-first-century play as if Shakespeare had originally written it? If so, the tricky question of limited repertoire faced by many festivals and theatre companies would be virtually limited. Just imagine, a new “Shakespearean” play every season.

Last year, I blogged about Troubadour Theatre Company, whose unique place in Shakespearean theatre is to simultaneously celebrate The Bard while poking fun at him. Their plays mix traditional text with improvisation to create a completely fresh take that both honors and ribs all the Shakespeare buffs hold sacred. One further key element is folded into the mix: music. For each production, the company picks a singer or band and incorporates their music into the show and their name into the title. Thus, this year they are offering As U2 Like It.

Given the length and diversity of Ireland’s globally conscious band’s career, this production could go in any number of directions. If pastiche is truly their goal, they’ll select tunes from each period to create a truly trippy show. Conversely, they could hew closely to one or two albums and create a more specific vibe. If the want the romantic comedy to have a clubby, futuristic mojo, they’ll stick to the 1990’s material, which went in a far more digital direction than their previous and subsequent output.

If they want a more socially conscious romp, then the 1980’s are a goldmine of music from which to draw parallels. Finally, if they want to keep it frothy and not get too deep, they’ll use the band’s most recent few albums. Ironically, as U2 has become more politically and socially active, some of their most popular songs in the past decade are a bit light on the content. “Vertigo” is a great track, but it’s not exactly making me think about Third World countries. Then again, for Troubadour’s giddy outings, that’s probably just fine.

I happened to come across a T.V. listing mentioning a Shakespeare-themed episode of a long-defunct television show. The play referenced was the The Taming of the Shrew and the television show was Moonlighting, a short-lived romantic dramedy that signed off from the airwaves nearly two decades ago. I can still remember the first time I watched it. I was a kid and even though I was only somewhat familiar with The Taming of the Shrew, I loved seeing modern characters in a Shakespearean setting. The setup is simple: an unseen child is sent to his room to do his homework by his also-unseen mother. The boy would rather watch Moonlighting, a show the mother doesn’t particularly like. Sent to his room to read Shakespeare, the boy reimagines the play as populated by the cast of the show.

Moonlighting hasn’t aged well. In fact, when I came across reruns a few years back, I cringed a little; had I really thought this was witty and funny? Yet, my perspective may be colored by the numerous programs after Moonlighting that employed its serious/wacky tone, direct-to-camera monologues and stylized approach. It was a love-it-or-hate-it affair, and a show destined to burn out quickly (in this case, the hard fall came after season two, when the two leads finally overcame their tension and hit the sheets). Still, this episode found the program at the height of its game, and it might have piqued my interest in Shakespeare. When Petruchio (Bruce Willis) tries to break into the room in which Kate (Cybill Shepherd) has locked herself, he finds an axe in a case that reads “In case of shrew, break glass.” I’m sorry, but that’s still funny.

Historically, the title role in Hamlet is rarely played as a young guy. The thinking is that by the time you’re old enough to understand all the makes the character tick, you are too old to play him. Whether that is fair or not (to say nothing of true), Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s plays often sought for recapture by the young (I guess they don’t relate as well to an old guy in a land war with his three daughters).

One writer has taken this idea one step further. He has rewritten Hamlet as a young adult novel, specifically portraying him as an adolescent. Wait a second, isn’t Hamlet supposed to be some crazy-brilliant, superstud? Isn’t he the original Dark Knight? What does it do to the character if he’s a geeky, awkward high schooler?

Obviously, in this case, one of the goals is to connect Shakespeare to a youth market, but the question raised by the book bears asking of the play itself. Even when described as an antihero, the word “hero” still hangs about Hamlet. He is a Prince after all, which means that he is an Important Person who must make Important Choices, right? What if he isn’t? What if he’s a young kid, as mixed up as any of us were at that age, who is simply having difficulty sorting himself out? A Hamlet of this nature would be far more earthbound than his reputation suggests. Given the legacy the play and the character have, can we tolerate and believe a Hamlet whose just an ordinary kid?

Another Side of the Island is a reimagining of The Tempest co-conceived and starring multiple award-winning actress Olympia Dukakis. Speeches have been moved and the context has been altered, but still Shakespeare’s words remain intact. The biggest change is that the lead character is now a woman, Prospera, naturally played by Dukakis. Interestingly, the article about this production credit Dukakis as a co-writer, presumably of the conceptual material since the words of the play remain. Even more curious is the decision to rename the play in light of these changes. What does this say about the difference between adaptation and high-concept production.

Dukakis is certainly not the first woman to play the role (though I would personally love for her to tell Miranda that her life is going down the toilet. Just me? Okay, sorry). She is also not the first person to rearrange text. When it comes to 21st-century productions, it has become de riguer to edit and rearrange text, as well as mix versions from different folios/quartos. Is Dukakis simply being more honest in titling her work? Is she saying to her audience, “Look, this is sort of Shakespeare, but also not Shakespeare”? The border between high-concept production and adaptation has grown fuzzier, and since older plays like those of Shakespeare are in the public domain, the need to distinguish those borders has been fairly low. Regardless of her motives, Dukakis’s approach stands as a move to redefine those borders in much clearer terms.

The Pan Asian Repertory is restaging a production entitled Shogun Macbeth, which retains Shakespeare’s language, but resets the action in feudal Japan. This conceptualization of the play was first stage nearly two decades ago, and its return is a testament to its artistic success. An interpretation such as this is often labeled multicultural or intercultural, implying an intersection of disparate cultures that comment on (and perhaps change) each other through their direct interaction. Thus, we can view this production as both an Asian take on an Elizabethan play or an Elizabethan take on medieval Asia.

What struck me about this production was its parallels to Orson Welles’s famous “voodoo” take on the same play. In his version, the play was set in the Caribbean, populated by actors of color, and re-imagined the witchcraft as a kind of island religious practice. Are there certain plays by Shakespeare that lend themselves more to this kind of retelling or is it simply that Macbeth is one of the Bard’s most famous works and thus receives more productions that some of the lesser known works?

It’s hard to answer this question definitively, but these two productions differ in one significant way. The PAR’s production was created and performed by Asian artists. Welles’ version is an outsider’s view of the culture. Whether you believe this matters or not, it certainly impacts the motivation behind the production. In both cases, it asks the audience to drastically re-imagine a play they thought they knew well.

In a recent item in The New Yorker, Alex Ross began his assessment of the Glimmerglass’s Shakespeare-themed season by posing a larger question about the Bard and his works: how did Shakespeare feel about music as an art form? Ross notes some of the popular quotes by Shakespeare that seem to indicate a fondness for music, and then juxtaposes them against others that offer a less enthusiastic assessment. What if Shakespeare’s feelings about music could be summed up as “Meh?”

Ross then delves further into the Glimmerglass’s series of productions of musical adaptations of Shakespeare, presumably to question what Will himself might think of such adaptations. The majority of the article focuses on a lesser known opera by Wagner entitled “A Ban on Love,” which is based on Measure for Measure. The opera, which flopped initially, has been edited and streamlined for its current incarnation. Aside from Glimmerglass’s edits, Shakespeare himself combined characters and storylines, most notably eliminating the Duke, whose 11th-hour proposal to Isabella has rendered the play so “problematic.”

A different question related to Ross’s inquiry might be whether it matters or not if Shakespeare would have approved of this adaptation. Playwrights tend to be fairly particular about their work (see Samuel Beckett), but does that mean they are right? If someone else can bring out something in a work that its author never intended, is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe Shakespeare hated music, but that doesn’t mean that the feeling was mutual.