Shakespeare, Harry Potter and Me, Gehayi

[gehayi]

I looked over the Shakespeare meme that's going around, but the problem with that is that it presumes that you've seen the plays both on stage and in the movies. I have never seen a Shakespeare play on stage or in the movies. The only adaptation of a Shakespeare play that I know I've seen is West Side Story. I've only ever read two plays for

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[arseaboutface]

Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

THANK YOU! I've been trying to remember the name of this book for days!

[gehayi]

*laughs* That's one of those books that everyone remembers--but no one remembers the title.

[furikku]

A lot of fandom stuff seems to assume that any participant is going to be wallowing in EVERY POSSIBLE PERMUTATION of whatever is being fanned, and that such a thing will follow one's thoughts every hour of the day.

Which is kinda weird to me because I tend to think about other things most of the time, and then even in the things I do have mild obsessions with, I quite often have permutations that I loathe passionately. (And, of course, there are very, very few songs that make me think of most of my fandoms.)

[gehayi]

A lot of fandom stuff seems to assume that any participant is going to be wallowing in EVERY POSSIBLE PERMUTATION of whatever is being fanned, and that such a thing will follow one's thoughts every hour of the day.

Yes, that's it exactly! And generally, like you, there are aspects of fandoms that I follow and aspects I don't.

(And, of course, there are very, very few songs that make me think of most of my fandoms.)

Unless, of course, it's a fandom based on a musical or a canon with related music--like the Pern fandom, which has a CD of Pernese songs. And I defy anyone who's heard the opening music for Star Wars to listen to it and not think of Star Wars. But Harry Potter isn't a particularly musical canon and never has been.

[furikku]

Yeah, like, theme songs obv. but I have rarely found anything in my day-to-day music that makes me think this-or-that fandom. Possibly because day-to-day music tends to be fairly common in its themes and I am a fan of things like Silent Hill, which is way too complex and murky for most music, and Pokemon, which is... not inherently emotionally deep. And there are not a whole lot of songs about "Oh man I have the BEST PET EVER it is adorable and can also level entire cities with its superpowers."

Though possibly there should be.

[ja_bucc]

I'm partial to Terrence Mann's Romeo and Juliet: The Musical. I don't loathe R&J or Shakespeare, or stories of true love, so that helps. I'll admit that my opinion is biased--both for my interest in all things Terrence Mann and for my love for most things romantic. :)

11. Character you're crushing on. (I rarely crush on characters, and when I do, they're generally in a visual medium like film or TV. Book characters--I can't think of a single time I've done that.

I can think of one time (that stands out) that I've done that. I totally and completely crushed on Masterharper Robinton. There. I admit it.

[gehayi]

They made it into a musical?

Now that might work, actually. I'd watch anything with Terrence Mann in it, and if there was a bonus of being able to hear his baritone as well...yeah, that has definite possibilities.

Plus musicals, like operas, aren't generally supposed to be realistic, so I'd be less likely to be tripping over the "Is this supposed to be romantic or are they just idiots?" aspects. I can accept the lack of realism as an aspect of the genre and move on.

I totally and completely crushed on Masterharper Robinton. There. I admit it.

*grins* Well, I knew THAT.

[ja_bucc]

"With the production of Romeo and Juliet: The Musical from William Shakespeare, which opened Aug. 18 at St. Paul's Ordway Theatre, Mann is trying a new type of theatrical creation; sharing a composing credit with soap tunesmith, J Korman, the two have literally set the Bard's words to a rock 'n' roll score. Mann also directs, a profession less foreign to a man who, as the artistic director of the North Carolina Theatre, has often helmed productions." ~ A snippet from an interview with Playbill On-line in 1999.

He wrote it, while sharing the composing credit with J. Korman, actually. It doesn't seem to have gone anywhere, but I've heard a couple of the songs. I should have said that I'm partial to what I've heard of it. :)

*grins back* I'm a teensy bit transparent that way.

[gehayi]

I should have said that I'm partial to what I've heard of it. :)

It's TERRY MANN. No explanation is necessary. Being partial to him only demonstrates your extraordinary good taste.

[lareinenoire]

They considered him overrated and incomprehensible. They did buy me a number of prose adaptations of his works--they felt an educated person should be familiar with the stories that he wrote--but they loathed both his plays and his poetry and definitely didn't approve of me reading him.

Ye gods, how awful! Neither of my parents is a Shakespeare enthusiast by any means, but they both certainly approved of my reading him (so long as I was spending equal time learning multiplication tables, etc).

Does your local library have the BBC Shakespeare DVDs, by chance? If so, some of them are excellent (the First Tet, for instance, also Derek Jacobi as a wonderfully camp yet tragic Richard II), though others are apparently awful. angevin2 actually has a series of posts she made about watching all of them

[gehayi]

Does your local library have the BBC Shakespeare DVDs, by chance?Er...I'm not sure. The main library has a DVD copy of Henry V (one with Olivier), but it's got a "No circ" tag next to it. The same goes for As You Like It (a 2007 version), A & E's 2004 version of Macbeth, and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V--no circulation. I don't know what the point is of having a video that doesn't circulate and thus doesn't get watched

[lareinenoire]

My dad made the mistake of showing me the Polanski Macbeth when I was five or six without realising what a Polanski film generally involved and it gave me some serious nightmares. So you're not missing much.

I can't find a blessed thing that says that ANYTHING is by the BBC. So I don't know if my library has the BBC collection or not.

I made a quick IMDB search and Cedric Messina and Jonathan Miller are directors of the BBC productions, with Shaun Sutton as producer, so those are the ones I was talking about. It looks like your library has either the entire set or a good percentage of it, but has it catalogued by producer/director for some odd reason.

I do have Chimes at Midnight as an .avi file on my computer and I could see about burning it onto a CD/DVD for you. The picture quality is decent -- I was able to watch it fullscreen on a 14" laptop with no issues. I might also have the 2004 Merchant of Venice on the giant storage drive, but I will need to check and see.

I still feel acutely uncomfortable about my strong dislike for

[sunnyskywalker]

I got lucky with a high school English teacher who was willing to explain things like Hamlet's "country matters" pun, showed us part of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's version, and had us write our own modern adaptations of scenes. I think he might have played us the Three Minute Hamlet song, too. It was a lot more fun that way. (We did talk about the themes and all the other English class-y things too.) Plus we went to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon to see some of the plays, which is pretty good for a field trip

[gehayi]

Well, we didn't study Hamlet. And I didn't know that "country matters" WAS a pun.

What's the Three Minute Hamlet song?

My teacher did have the idea of taking us to a Shakespearean play, but about 90% of the parents--not just mine but everyone else's, too--decreed that that was a waste of time. Sitting in class talking about a play none of us had ever seen = legitimate schoolwork. Going to see a play = entertainment..."and you aren't going to school to be ENTERTAINED!"

I never heard Cymbeline described that way, but boy does it fit!

[sunnyskywalker]

I didn't catch the pun by myself either! I think we were all too busy looking for srs bzns because it's Shakespeare, and it took the grownups to point out the dirty bits to us teenagers. Which sounds totally backwards.

Three Minute Hamlet is a song by Seamus Kennedy which summarizes the play in three minutes. The lyrics are pretty well transcribed here, and I can't check right now to see whether this audio works, but it might. It's probably on YouTube too.

[gehayi]

*laughs* Oh, that's great. And yes, that does summarize the story well. It's a pretty good murder mystery, actually. Granted, you know from the start that Claudius did it and you hope he's not going to get away with it, but you don't know how he's going to get his.

It's just that Shakespeare tends to get treated as OMG SRS BSNSS. Which I think is a bad way to sell it so students, really.