Shakespeare 400

I have to admit that I am not really doing all that much to mark what is generally considered to be the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death (April 23).  I did add one more Shakespeare performance back in March (Richard III) to this list of productions I've seen (I'm missing a few, but most are there).  Somewhat incredibly I am not going to see any Shakespeare at Stratford this summer, since I don't feel like seeing Macbeth again and they are doing a really odd fusion of the history plays.  However, I'll see the two plays at High Park: Hamlet and All's Well that Ends Well.  I don't think my son would quite get All's Well (it isn't really that funny for a comedy) and I am debating taking him to Hamlet.  He could probably handle it.  A bit closer to us, Driftwood is going to be doing Taming of the Shrew set in the 80s.  I'll definitely go see that and probably will take him as well.  They were supposed to have the tour dates up today, but I guess it will be tomorrow.*  Probably at least one or two of the Fringe productions will be Shakespeare, simply because there are no pesky rights to deal with.  So I'm not worried about getting enough Shakespeare this year.

In terms of the rest of the day, I'll see if any of the BBC Radio 3 shows are streamable.  Though I really ought to just work on a bit of my own scripts, either this short piece I started for SFYS while in Chicago, or the reworking of King Lear.  While I am definitely wondering whether I should go forward with this (and I'm working on blog post called Justify Your Production to hash out these issues), I could at least write out another few pages and see if there is any magic there.

If I had all the time in the world, I would watch Kurosawa's Ran (though I still haven't made it all the way through Ikiru, which I wanted to watch again once I returned to my role as a bureaucrat of sorts).  If I can dig it out, I will make a serious effort to get to Welles' Chimes at Midnight tonight.

* So they open with a show at Todmorden Mills on July 8, and then there is almost an entire week in Withrow Park the third week of July, which is when I will plan on going.  Quite exciting...