A recent article makes yet another claim to add to Shakespeare’s list of achievements: according to this writer, Shakespeare is the most filmed author of all time, with literally hundreds of big-screen adaptations of his films. On one hand, this shouldn’t be particularly surprising given the amount of support, adoration and interrogation The Bard has merited; still, there might be more to glean from a detailed breakdown of the films, particularly to draw some conclusions about adaptations in the last twenty years.

First, how many of the films included in the count are made for television and how many are fashioned for the big screen? Kenneth Branagh, who was the unofficial king of film adaptations a decade ago, saw his most recent adaptation, As You Like It, premiere on cable television in the United States. A corollary question might be to ask what the geographic breakdown of these films is. Doubtlessly, the list would be more heavily weighted towards the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, while the United States would have fewer offerings.

I’m not sure what, if anything, that would say about our culture. There certainly isn’t a lack of love for Shakespeare in the U.S. Coming of the summer, it is easy to see just how many theatres across the country produce Shakespeare each year (and many include it as part of their traditional seasons in the fall and spring as well). Perhaps that might explain Will’s relative absence from American cinema. Maybe we only think of him in terms of theatre.

A recent radio broadcast (the transcript of which is available online) highlighted the unique and impressive career of Jessica Tandy. Although she became famous for playing cute-feisty old ladies in her later years, Tandy’s stage career was far more extensive, including a full roster of Shakespearean performances opposite some of the great actors of the twentieth century.

Tandy, who passed away nearly fifteen years ago, won an Academy Award at the age of 80. She was often written about as the opposite of an overnight success. Her most substantial film roles came at the end of her life, despite her lengthy contribution to the stage world, particularly in performances opposite her actor-husband, Hume Cronyn. After playing the lead in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway in the late 1940’s, she was famously passed over for Vivien Leigh, who was a bigger name in the film industry.

Despite these setbacks (and an ongoing battle with stage fright), Tandy worked assiduously in the theatre. She performed in many Shakespearean plays, most notably as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, a role she played while only in her early forties. Tandy’s maturity often resulted in her playing mothers and other characters older than her own age. In that light, perhaps it makes sense that she achieved her greatest fame and acclaim in her twilight years. On stage and in film, Miss Tandy possessed a grace and dignity that always seemed well beyond her years.

A recent item titled “James Bond and Shakespeare” turned out to be a piece about museums. While I find museums incredibly cool, I was hoping for some wild connection between Ian Fleming’s hero and The Bard. At the very least, I was hoping for someone to explain who picked the perfectly dreadful title to the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. Alas, no secret link between everyone’s favorite super spy and the scrappy little writer from Stratford was to be found.

Still, Bond (James Bond) in all of his incarnations owes more than a little bit to the heroes and antiheroes of Shakespeare. In the seventies and eighties, Bond films became increasingly lightweight. Fights and explosions were fun, pretty even, but the lacked gravitas. Furthermore, our hero spent more time in exotic hotel rooms with vixen-ish leading ladies than trying to prevent the end of the world. This Bond was every bit one of Shakespeare’s romantic leads: debonair and charming, mischievous, and not exactly forward thinking when it came to women.

The new, twenty-first-century Bond is darker and grittier, which has been hailed as a return to form. This is Bond as Hamlet, all dark corners, unresolved feelings and raging anger. This far-from-perfect guy isn’t always a hero, and he is given to more than his share of Shakespearean, existential brooding. Shakespeare didn’t write Bond, but his shadow looms large over this character, whose many personalities reflect the times in which they are written, much like the Bard’s characters did.

“Nickelodeon to ’spank’ Shakespeare” was the title of the article, so I decided to investigate further. The item announced the intended production of a film version of the novel Spanking Shakespeare, a fictional book following the adolescent trials of a teen. The book, which was published within the last year, was featured in an earlier blog.

Frankly, the title of the article was a bit cheeky (unintentional pun) for a piece about a kid-friendly television station. Then again, material marketed to kids having decidedly non-kid content has been something of a hot topic lately—one I think that draws pertinent comparisons to the Bard himself.

Some of Shakespeare’s plays have become acceptable reading for youngsters (provided the right guidance is given). Aiding this trend is the fact that many of his randier references will completely bypass the twenty-first-century youngster’s pop-culture wavelength. In their own time, these references would have been far from obscure. In addition, theatre’s social reputation was on par with prostitution further dampening its family appeal.

As we age, we are fond of finding youth culture increasingly frightening. It might be easy to worry about the appropriateness of something like Spanking Shakespeare: The Movie because of what it might say to or about our kids. If you’re middle-aged or older, have you ever found yourself thinking that the world is scarier for kids now than when we were growing up? If so, imagine being a kid four hundred years ago, when plagues claimed thousands of lives (and not peacefully), wars were plentiful and religious freedom was basically non-existent. Maybe Shakespeare wasn’t all that shocking after all.

A recent item about the Stratford Shakespeare Festival focused on several musicals it will be producing. Several of these plays are based on plays by classic authors (including, naturally, Shakespeare). What this item made me think of was the fusion of Shakespeare and the musical. While there have been myriad adaptations that re-set the action and update the language, there have been very few successful attempts at making a musical with Shakespeare’s language intact. If Shakespeare buffs and scholars are forever going on and on about the poetic and musical quality of the language, why haven’t more productions taken advantage of it? The fact that many Shakespeare plays include music only further emphasizes the curiousness of this discrepancy.

The most notable attempt was Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labours Lost, a 2000 film that set the play in the 1930’s and added songs from the period. It is an absolutely wonderful idea that somehow went horribly, horribly wrong (resulting in a critical trouncing and a box-office nosedive). Since I wholeheartedly believe in the concept, pinpointing the key to its failure is tricky. Certainly, casting actors with limited singing and dancing ability is problematic, though think of how many movie stars have charmed their way through musicals with virtually no musical training. In addition, the old-school use of wide shots with long takes (meant to mirror musicals of the past) is particularly unforgiving for the novices in the cast. Finally, there’s the “Hey-let’s-put-on-a-show!” energy that carries the cast to garish extremes. Perhaps the lesson of Love’s Labours Lost’s failure to create a truly Shakespearean musical is not its lack of effort, but rather how much the weight of that effort is felt in every frame.

Having a photographic record of your rehearsals and performances will be so meaningful to you and your cast, not to mention the extremely proud parents and grandparents who will want to show everyone and their dog pictures from the production! The only thing I want to warn you about is using a professional photographer. Keep in mind that any pictures a photographer takes become their “intellectual property.” Now, I’m sure there are exceptions, and contracts can be drawn up, etc., etc., etc. But to save a great many headaches, it might be nice to ask a student photographer or willing parent to do it for you. This year, the father of Petruchio and Grumio is doing our photography, and let me tell you, I know these are going to be great pictures. He took a ton of pictures last year of the kids backstage, and then of the performance, and honestly, his pictures were of equal or better quality than those of the professional photographer we had there. So I’m thankful he is willing to do all of it for us this year!

Be sure that you get a list of pictures you want taken to your photographer. This year, we are including pictures of every cast member in our playbill, so John will be taking head shots of all 24 kids, which will be condensed to 1″ or so size to fit in the playbill. He’s doing these on Monday, so I’ll have a checklist of all the kids for him to follow. Then he’s coming to the two dress rehearsals to take pictures. Of course, I want him to wander around and take lots of great candids, like he did last year, but I will also have a list of the groups I want to have pictures taken of. For example, I want a picture of Petruchio and Grumio together…Petruchio and Kate together…Hortensio and his Widow together…all of Petruchio’s servants…the Christopher Sly framework actors…Baptista with Kate and Bianca…you see what I’m getting at. Have it all typed out so that your photographer can just call names, go down the list, and get the shots you want. And stick to your guns - If you have a certain grouping of actors that you want, but the photographer says, “You know, it would look better if we did this,” listen to his/her suggestions, but be sure you are still getting all of the kids in the photographs you want. Last year I had my list typed up, but the photographer decided to switch some people around without my knowledge. Turns out that I now have no picture of one of my actors from last year in her small group shot like I wanted, all because the photographer thought he knew better.

I know that there are wonderful professional photographers out there who will listen to what you want and work with you regarding costs, usage of the photos in the future, etc. It was unfortunate that my first experience with a professional photographer was a negative one. I would just suggest that you get references from his/her previous clients, as well as a very clear contract so that there are no questions or problems in the future.

If you plan to record your play, watch out for copyright issues.  One example is music.  Using music that is not public domain, then recording your play with said music in it can lead to headaches that a school or amateur theatre company really doesn’t need.  Personally, I don’t know enough about copyright law to give much advice in this post - just be aware that you need to be careful about what you use in your production if you plan to record your performances…and especially if you are going to be selling your DVDs.  But we have all very much enjoyed having our copies from last year, and I do plan to have Shrew recorded.  I think I had about 20 people buy copies of the DVD for Much Ado, as they make great Christmas gifts for proud relatives and friends of the family.

Definitely take pictures (include rehearsals, if you can - those can be super fun to have!)…definitely record your performance(s)…these will be treasured keepsakes for years to come!  Just be smart about it - get references for your photographer and videographer, and make your expectations very clear up front - and do be sure to check into possible copyright issues.

Fernando Meirelles is part of the recent Latino auteur boom in Hollywood. Along with contemporaries like Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro, Meirelles has made his mark in the film industry with two very different, but highly praised movies. In 2003, he was a surprise nominee for Best Director for the vivid City of God. Two years later, his adaptation of the novel The Constant Gardener was also lauded (and earned Rachel Weisz a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Now Meirelles is setting his sights on Shakespeare.

Meirelles is involved in two projects related to The Bard. The first is a television series about a Shakespearean acting company based on the Canadian series, Slings and Arrows (I have mentioned S&A several times in this blog, and it ROCKS! If you haven’t seen it, it’s reason enough to get a Netflix subscription). The other Shakespearean cinematic outing for Meirelles is Brazilian version of Love’s Labours Lost. This film will be loose adaptation of the play in a modern setting , thus distancing itself from the other film version of the play, Kenneth Branagh’s commercially unsuccessful 2000 take.

In discussing the projects, Meirelles stated, ““Shakespeare is a heavy drug. The more you read, the more you want to read. Each line has poetry, philosophy, a deep understanding of what we are.” While Shakespeare fans rabidly await these projects, Meirelles’s latest film, Blindness, is making the rounds on the festival circuit building up to a fall release.

Titus Andronicus is rearing its bloody head again, this time in a production in Illinois. A recent write-up on the show mentioned that the production will (natch) lean heavily on the grisly, gory elements of the story. It is unsurprising, as the play tends to yield interpretations in the Hostel vein. What was also interesting about the article was its mentioning of a film called Theatre of Blood, a horror film from 1973 starring Vincent Price.

The connection? The film features a mad, bad actor who dispatches critics one by one to get his revenge. What makes the murders novel is that each is based on a scene from Shakespeare, including one from Titus Andronicus (I’ll spare you the gross details. Let’s just say, be careful what you eat). In addition to recreating the stage scenes in order to kill his victims, Price also gets to recite some of the great soliloquies from the plays.

Aside from the obvious jabs at critics, Theatre of Blood is also oddly Shakespearean in its own right. In particular, it parallels the often operatic level of excess employed in performing Titus Andronicus. In the play and in the film, people don’t just die, they are devoured (literally, in some cases). Yet amidst all of the beheadings and disemboweling, there is poetry. It is what Shakespeare does best: mixing together high art and low art so seamlessly that you cannot tell the difference between the two.

I have always been a movie buff, from the time I was a little kid. I remember my mom taking me to see Disney’s Robin Hood at the theater (you know, the one where Robin Hood and Marian are foxes, and Prince John is a thumb-sucking lion…PJ? PJ! Oh, I like that…Hiss, put it on my luggage!). And I remember going to my first drive-in movie with my brother - Young Frankenstein.  Probably not the best movie for a 6-year-old to watch - I believe a lot of the humor was lost on me until later years!

But movies have always been important to me and played a big part in my life…especially historical epics!  Oh, my…that year that both Braveheart and Rob Roy came out?!?!  I thought I’d died and gone to historical cinema heaven! And, of course, being a huge Shakespeare/Elizabethan buff, I adore movies like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love.

But what on earth does this have to do with Staging Shakespeare? Well, one thing that has been very helpful, not only to my cast but also to the students in my English classes, is to teach Shakespeare’s plays utilizing good film versions of the plays. Of course, when I teach Henry V to my 8th graders, we watch the Branagh film - read one act, watch the act; read the next act, watch that act, etc. When I teach Hamlet, we watch bits of both the Gibson and the Branagh films, and when I teach Macbeth, I’ve found that I prefer the BBC version of the play with Nicol Williamson (remember him as Merlin in Excalibur?) over the Ian McKellen/Judi Dench play, although I like to show scenes from both. (Speaking of Excalibur - Here’s some trivia for you - Cherie Lunghi, who played Guenevere, also did a fabulous Beatrice in the BBC’s Much Ado About Nothing! Kind of cool that two Excalibur cast members also did some mean Shakespeare!)

So back in May and June, when the weather here was icky and we couldn’t start rehearsing outside, our cast spent a great deal of time working on the text - reading parts aloud; figuring out what various words and phrases meant; determining what their characters might be thinking and feeling at any given moment. Once we were finished, we would watch whatever scenes we had worked on that day from the BBC version of Shrew, with John Cleese as Petruchio. Talk about a HOOT! John Cleese is just a great actor anyway, but seeing him come in for his wedding to Katharina, dressed in some hideous burlap-type vest, no shirt on underneath, but an enormous yellow sunflower stuck to the vest…and a hat with the longest feathers sticking out in front of it…I could go on…I won’t…except to mention that Grumio had some weird face painted on his bare belly, under a very similar ensemble as that of Petruchio’s! The kids loved it, and they saw some really outstanding acting in the process. We also watched the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor film version, which is such an enjoyable movie, especially when you consider that Burton and Taylor were married at the time they made the movie…it definitely created quite the dynamic for their performances!

Using film versions of the plays seems almost like a no-brainer, really. In this day and age of audio and visual technology, why wouldn’t a teacher or director want to use film to help their students really get into Shakespeare? The only downside I can see is that you don’t ever want your actors to feel like they have to play a part exactly like some famous actor did it. I was hesitant about showing the Branagh Much Ado last year, simply because I didn’t want anyone to feel like there was only one way to play these characters. But I also showed them the BBC version (the one with Cherie Lunghi as Beatrice) in order to demonstrate that there are definitely different ways of approaching the characters, the scenery, the costumes, the everything of putting together a stage production…as long as you don’t deviate from Shakespeare’s text!

Just a suggestion, too, concerning those BBC plays - If you look for them on Amazon or other commercial websites, you’ll probably only find them available to purchase as sets - all of the comedies, all of the histories, or even all 37 plays in one huge bundle. If you are interested in buying them individually, go to the Folger Library website - www.folger.edu - and you can purchase them through their gift shop, one at a time. I’ve slowly been building my collection this way, purchasing the ones I need for school or for whatever plays I am considering directing in the future.

And finally…a little ritual that I started last summer as our production neared completion and we were almost to Opening Night. When I start to worry about the play coming together, actors learning their lines, costumes being finished, sets being painted, but I know I’ve done everything I can do and it’s up to the kids, I pop in my copy of Shakespeare in Love.  If I have time, I’ll watch the whole film, but sometimes I’m just too tired to stay up and watch it after my children are in bed, so instead, I will skip to the scene where Will’s Romeo and Juliet is about to start.  Henslowe’s tailor, playing the Chorus, is stuttering backstage, and Will looks like he would rather slit his wrists than let the play go on.  Then the Chorus gets pushed out onto the stage, and it almost appears that he won’t be able to get the words out…but suddenly, his voice is perfect, exclaiming, “Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene….” I absolutely love that entire part of the movie, where they show what it might have been like the very first time R&J was on the stage…except, of course, where a gorgeous Gwyneth Paltrow saves the day! And then, when the play is over, and the audience just sits there, like they didn’t know what hit them…until finally, thunderous applause and ovations! Ah, yes…it helps me sleep better that night!

In many of the umpteen-million versions of Cinderella, the wicked stepsisters are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Both are typically ugly, poorly dressed, and out of shape. In addition, they are both portrayed as snotty, conniving and seriously lacking in brains. In short, they are the same character. A similar fate often befalls productions of Shakespeare’s how-many-plotlines-can-we-stuff-into-one-play? tragedy, King Lear. The ill-fated Cordelia stands out as the forsaken favorite, but her two sisters, Goneril and Regan, are too frequently, well, wicked stepsisters.

Hoping to avoid this pitfall is the new and much-publicized film version of King Lear starring everyone’s favorite flesh-eater, Anthony Hopkins, as the mad king. As previously announced, Cordelia and Regan will be played, respectively by Keira Knightley (she of the teeth and cheekbones) and Gwyneth Paltrow (she of the children with ridiculous names). It was just released that Goneril will be played by Australian actress Naomi Watts.

I have high hopes for Watts in this part, as she, Knightley and Paltrow are very different actresses (with different strengths and weaknesses) that will ostensibly translate to three distinct characters. Watts biggest downfall is that she’s a bit of a sulker. She’s good, but sometimes tends to weep and glower her way through her films. The upside is that she’s a fierce and intense performer who should more than hold her own among her costars. Goneril differs from her sisters in that she is more extreme in pursuit of her goals, and thus more shattered when it all falls apart. She’s phenomenally unhappy, and unhappy is what Watts does best.