It’s no secret that film and television actors often return to the stage in order to work on their craft or simply recapture the experience of working in front of a live audience. Shakespearean productions are particularly alluring because of the perceived credibility boost they give said actors. Gone is the stigma attached to doing stage work. The hierarchy used to be film, television, and then stage work. Now actors move easily among all three forms based on where the interesting projects lie.

The city of Boston has seen a flood of actors from the still-booming cable series pool arrive in Beantown to perform Shakespeare in Boston Common. A few years ago, Jeffrey Donovan of the hit series, Burn Notice, gave Hamlet a shot. This summer, audiences will be able to catch Frederick Weller of the new (and popular) show, In Plain Sight. While some actors might veer toward the tragedies because of the implied gravitas (like Donovan in Hamlet), Weller will be tackling one of the male leads in the comedy As You Like It.

Weller has the added benefit of being relatively new to mainstream audiences. While he has worked steadily in film, television, and on stage, he is the type of actor audiences are most likely to recognize by face rather than by name. The benefit of this is fans can assess his work in Shakespeare on its own merits, without any tabloid tales cluttering their viewpoints. All of that might change, however, if In Plain Sight continues on for numerous seasons.

Appropriation can work both ways. Often, when discussing high-concept productions of Shakespeare, that concept involves some degree of appropriation. For example, it has become increasingly popular to apply an eastern aesthetic to The Bard’s plays (see Kenneth Branagh’s film of As You Like It for reference). In other words, in order to reinvent the context of these ages-old plays, ideas from other cultures and art forms are liberally borrowed.

Yet, the reverse is also possible. A new version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, dubbed Revenge of the King, has done just that. In this version, the play goes hip-hop and adopts a street milieu. The pivotal “Mousetrap” sequence in which Claudius’s duplicity is revealed has now become an MC face-off. In addition, most of the language has been updated to make it more accessible to the target audience. Instead of the play appropriating the concept, the concept has appropriated the play.

There are two ways to look at this. First, you can argue that Revenge of the King provides an entrée into Shakespeare. Contrastingly, you could say that this isn’t “real” Shakespeare and is completely devoid of the spirit and the poetry of the original. Perhaps neither one of these is right because both assume that the text is and should be the starting and ending point. It seems as if the creators of Revenge of the King, however, are using it as the former and not the latter. Instead of debating whether it is “true” Shakespeare, we might do better to ask whether or not it is true to itself.

It’s almost time. Men will be dashing to drug stores and supermarkets to pick up last minute gifts, cards and other sundries. Women will begin their collective eye-rolling at this panic, marveling how “the most romantic day of the year” still manages to take their mates by surprise year after year. Despite Valentine’s Day’s commercial veneer, many just want to feel special about the someone special in their lives. While the “Be Mine” heart-shaped candies and ubiquity of the color red in stores leave little doubt that the day has been largely consumed by commercialization, the day still manages to make people reflect on their relationships. Regardless of age, race, culture or orientation, couples must pick a side on Valentine’s Day, either for it or against it—and woe to the couple whose partners are not on the same side.

If overpriced chocolates, flowers and stationery are not your thing, the Orient Express’s British Pullman is offering a romantic dinner ride with Shakespeare a la carte. Scenes from his comedies (no doubt with an emphasis on romantic ones) will be presented by members of the Oxford Shakespeare Coompany. Instead of listening to Celine Dion or light jazz, adventurous romantics can take in samples of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It. If you’ve every endured your significant other’s maladroit attempts at poetry (seriously, should the word “hot” ever appear in a poem), you may welcome the reprieve this unique entertainment offers. Who knows? Maybe Two Gentlemen of Verona’s aptly named character Valentine might even make an appearance.

Shakespeare’s women are nothing if not succinct. While their husbands, fathers, brothers and male friends blather endlessly about every stupid thought in their heads, the girls choose their words carefully; so carefully, in fact, that many of them simply do not speak for lengthy stretches. Given the tradition of boy actors in Shakespeare’s time, perhaps this reduced “female” presence made sense. Still, Will’s heroines are at times maddeningly taciturn. At the end of Measure for Measure, does Isabella accept the marriage propose to her or renounce it and continue with her religious avocation? No one can be sure because she never utters another word, and as a result Measure for Measure has become the Edwin Drood of Shakespeare’s canon because each production must decide how to end it.

Somewhere out in internetland, some folks explored this problem from the opposite perspective. Instead of focusing on the negative, they counted the number of lines of every female character in Shakespeare’s plays to discover who was the most talkative. The results are surprising in that they do not include The Bard’s most famous femmes like Juliet or Lady Macbeth. Coming in at number three is Imogen, the plucky heroine of the complex (and often confusing) Cymbeline. First runner-up goes to the Queen of the Nile herself in Antony and Cleopatra. Finally, the gabbiest gal in Bard-dom is none other that Rosalind from As You Like It. The winner is easily the most recognizable of the three as the other two are featured in less frequently staged works. What does that say about contemporary appreciation of Shakespeare’s women? Do we simply exalt the plays based on the male characters and the women become famous by default (sort of like Kelly Preston)? Or, more insidiously, do we prefer these characters when they suffer in silence?

Shakespeare has been set in the Old South, the dystopian future, and every imaginable version of the present day. His characters have been reimagined as circus acrobats, kabuki performers and modern dancers. Since once of my recent blogs dealt with Shakespeare’s parallels to baseball, it is probably unsurprising that athletes and athletic settings have shown up in productions of his work. As a result, Shakespeare has gone the way of the WWF (or whatever the wrestling organization is called since the wrestling organization is called the World Wildlife Federation gave it a smackdown of its own). A recent production of Shakespeare’s popular comedy, As You Like It, has been staged in a wrestling ring. Subtle.

Ostensibly, this concept seeks to bring out ideas about competition, rivalry, and the battle of the sexes. Of course, the best way to do that apparently is to have Rosalind break a chair over someone’s head. As an audience member, a high-concept Shakespearean production hinges on the revelation of something new or undiscovered. Too often, however, concepts reinforce what we already know and the effect is similar to watching an Oliver Stone movie—one or two ideas are loaded into a gunpowder-packed cannon and fired directly into the audience. Does setting this romantic comedy in this camp, highly sexualized world do the play any favors? Also, since all of the fighting in wrestling is fake, how seriously is the audience supposed to take the conflicts in the play? I’ll ponder that as I await the inevitable tennis-themed The Taming of the Shrew with Petruchio and Katerina recast as Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King.

As a society, we never seem to tire of ranking things. Whether it is the American Film Institute’s list of the one hundred greatest movies or the weekly top video countdown, the need to name something “The Best” is universal. So it is not surprising that someone created a list of the greatest wits of all time. Shakespeare naturally made the cut, as did Oscar Wilde. The real curio, however, is Oasis musician Liam Gallagher. Really? Gallagher aside, the pairing of Shakespeare and Wilde struck me. Do these two writers share anything other than wit?

Wilde’s life and career were notoriously cut short by the famous trial over “the love that dare not speak its name.” Still, in his brief life, Wilde produced some of the sharpest comedies ever written about high society. His most famous of these is the mistaken-identity charmer The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet, how does this work line up against that of Shakespeare? Mistaken identity and double identity (which figure so prominently in Earnest) certainly show up in Shakespeare’s comedies. Twelfth Night and As You Like It feature cross-dressing heroines; The Comedy of Errors boasts not one but two sets of mixed-up twins; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream features a quartet of lovers, just like Earnest. Overall, however, the two writers create more of a contrast than a comparison. Both were witty and clever, but the snidely dry Wilde and the play-to-the-rafters Shakespeare made people laugh for very different reasons.

Movie stars have always been a selling point for theatre audiences. Last year, the entire run of the play Three Days of Rain sold out because it happened to star an actress named Julia Roberts. As stars of film, television, and even music (Madonna doing Mamet, anyone? Cyndi Lauper in Brecht? Any takers? No?….) continue to flood the theatre to increase their actor cred, their name recognition boosts theatre sales.

Shakespeare productions are no different in their bids for notoriety, which explains why a British production of As You Like It is also going the celebrity route, albeit in a different way. Fresh off their “roles” in an upcoming film version of AYLI, these actors jumped at the opportunity to repeat them onstage. The only difference is, well, they’re sheep. Taking a cue from the box-office disappointment Evan Almighty, this production has included animals to the mix as an added attraction. Reading this, I couldn’t help wondering if star sheep make the same outrageous demands as their human counterparts? Do they have entourages? Personal assistants? Will the sheep stars bring both the commercial and critical success the producers desire? Will the audiences be riveted by the sheep or, ahem, just end up counting them?

Kenneth Branagh is back and he’s taking the Bard to the East. Branagh has kept a rather low profile on the big screen since his last Shakespearean effort, 2000’s ill-received Love’s Labour’s Lost, but now he’s reunited with the playwright who made Branagh a marquee name for a new adaptation of As You Like It. The film, which debuts on HBO rather than in theaters, is noteworthy for two main reasons. For starters, Branagh does not appear in the film, a first in his Shakespearean films. Second, he has reset the play in Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. Now, if you’re envisioning a snarky Best Week Ever clip featuring the song “Turning Japanese,” Branagh wants you to know that this is not Shakespeare meets The Mikado. Although Branagh’s eclectic cast is notably Caucasian (despite the new setting), there’s a historical justification. His concept is to set the play during a period when an influx of Europeans on Japanese soil marked the beginning of the country’s westernization. The goal? To create a commentary on the intersection of these cultures and the West’s exoticization of the East. Whether the conceit will pay off remains to be seen, yet in doing so Branagh is ironically honoring Shakespeare’s own storytelling. The playwright notoriously ripped off the work of other writers (to the extent that people still debate his authorship), so there’s an interesting meta-commentary about appropriation in Branagh’s approach that asks the question, “Whose story is it anyway?”