With all this talk about adaptations, I wanted to see if the same Shakespeare hype was present on TV shows. I came to find that over the years some very popular American television shows have included Shakespearean themes or Shakespeare adaptations themselves.
The first episode came from a show before our time, but one most of us are still familiar with, Gilligan's Island. In one episode, named "The Producer" the cast of Gilligan's Island puts on their own musical version of Hamlet.
Embedding has been disabled, but If you want to check out a video of a scene from this episode I would watch this video of Gilligan's Island Gilligan as Hamlet sings "To be or not to be".
Something everyone may remember from our childhood, "Wishbone" did an episode for "The Tempest" called "Shakespaw". Certainly a different feel than the Shakespeare Behind Bars adaptation. The full episode is available in the youtube videos below:
Sorry to side track if you were enjoying the Shakespeare tv episodes but while looking for Shakespeare on TV, I came across something one of my highschool teachers showed us in our British Literature class, as well as in the Shakespeare elective class that I took with her. I had completely forgot about this, but If you haven't seen it I would highly recommend it.
A group called " The reduced Shakespeare Company" has a show they preform live called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The group's website is reduced shakespeare if you want to see or learn more. Anyways they put on a hilarious show including bits from all of Shakespeare's works.
Below is a video of the Reduced Shakespeare's Company of the comedies.
Here's Romeo & Juliet, I wanted to find something a lot of people would be familiar with.
I hope you enjoy! There are many more videos from the RSC on youtube if you are interested.
Wow. I hadn't heard the Wishbone theme song for about 16 years now.
ReplyDeleteIt's really interesting to compare the performances from Shakespeare Behind Bars to the ones in Wishbone. Just their uses of intonation and emotion paint such starkly different pictures of the Tempest. I really like reading Shakespeare in general.
One interesting thing is that you can read a character's lines in such a wide variety of intonation and emotions that you can really portray the characters in any way that you see fit. I thought it was really cool to see the inmates trying to detect the actual emotion of the character while rehearsing.
I'm not trying to steal your thunder or anything, but you actually inspired me to do a similar creative engagement because of this post.