Brush Up Your Shakespeare

One of the many things I love about Fringe: even the Bard is considered Fringe, or at least Fringe material...

Notable past successes that spring to my mind include Calibanco Theatre's take on "Two Noble Kinsmen" (which got them their start both in and out of the Fringe, and now they're back with "Feeling Faust") and "Love's Lines, Angles and Rhymes" from the wonderful local playwright Todd Hughes (who, among others, I wax rhapsodic about in Minnesota Fringe Festival 2004: A Love Story) and of course last year's hilariously exhausting and yet somehow also reverent treatment of "One Man Hamlet."

This year, we've got a hat trick of Shakespearean fun:

Akespeareshay
Starting Gate Productions
Hey City Upstairs
First, they superimpose a piglet head on Shakespeare's torso, then there's "incest, battles, suicide, patricide, 7 languages, iambic pentameter and how we receive The Bard" *and* it's still "Family-Friendly." Gotta love 'em. Well, maybe you don't, but I do. They already got the kinks worked out as part of their summer season and now they're bringing it to the Fringe. Can't wait.

MacBlank
Fifty Foot Penguin (love the logo, love the name)
Hey City Upstairs (I sense a trend)
"It's 2004, and MacBeth is still quite peeved about that beheading. His vengeful plan to kill the last living MacDuff (an anxious American named Charlie) goes terribly awry." Again, you don't have to love it, but I do.

The Tamer Tamed
Lakeshore Players & EmPea Productions
Bryant Lake Bowl (Fringe home of One Man Hamlet)
Kate is dead. Petruchio, the famed wife tamer, has remarried a tame, obedient woman, or so he thought. The battle of wills is fought anew in this feminist comedy. I'm a sucker for these things. This, too, I recommend. It sounds like fun.

For the Fringe, there's no Shakespeare like revisionist Shakespeare. Let's hear it for the groundlings.

(Exit, pursued by a bear)

(For more of my writing - plays, past blog entries and more - visit www.matthewaeverett.com)