Results tagged “melissadunphy”

Poor Hamlet (the play, not the character). It's one of those plays that just can't catch a break. Hell, there's even a play called I Hate Hamlet. And yet, it manages to be one of the most quoted plays in the canon, one of the most frequently taught plays from its time, and (one could argue), one of Shakespeare's most analyzed (and over analyzed!) works.

What is there to say, really, about any production of Romeo & Juliet that probably hasn't been said already? It is, after all, the first Shakespearean play that most of us are exposed to, and although it's not (at least in my opinion) one of Shakespeare's best works, it's probably his most frequently performed. So the challenge for any theatre company wishing to produce it is how to do like Ezra Pound said and make it new.

There's a reason that nobody really produces Pericles, one of Shakespeare's final plays. And that reason is, to put it bluntly, that Pericles is really stupid. Really stupid. Most directors, producers, and English teachers know this, accept it, and pretend that the play doesn't exist at all. And then there's The Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, which decided to revive this forgotten work, using a script developed and adapted by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that cleaned and clarified Shakespeare's original text in order to "[relate] the story more succinctly."