By John Reed
(Staged Reading Shakespeare Inspired show)
Ready for a good yarn for the Halloween season? Prolific author John Reed creates a new Shakespearean tale with "All The World's a Grave". Shakespearean characters and passages are reshpaed into a new story. Old familiar faces take on new intentions and circumstances in Reed's moving and dark work. Hudson Shakespeare Company produces a one night staged reading.
Performance Dates:
Review -
In an inspired bit of bricolage, Reed selects characters and passages from Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V and recombines them into a new work. Well, new is an overstatement, since all major plot twists are lifted from the aforementioned plays—the murder of an old king by someone poisoned by ambition, a young prince determined to expose his father’s killer, an innocent young woman falsely accused and then murdered by her husband. Only the names have been shuffled to freshen the story. Here Macbeth kills Hamlet’s father, Juliet marries Hamlet (and then, poor girl, plays Desdemona to his Othello), and King Lear leads an army, like Fortinbras, into Hamlet’s blood-soaked country (Bohemia, not Denmark). This “remix version” of Shakespeare proves fascinating and entertaining. Reed clearly loves the Bard. His pastiche contains many of Shakespeare’s best passages, which are always a delight to reread. More impressive, though, Reed fashions from this familiar material a story containing enough surprises to delight even those well versed in the Bard. --Jack Helbig
October 29 - Location TBA
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