So in the most expensive Shakespeare thread they’re posting about straight Shakespeare plays. The oddball ones are left to the wayside.
But I’ve found them fun in my day. And thought it might be fun for us to discuss them.
So what do you guys know and like/hate?
I’ll toss the easy one out there:
Ten Things I Hate About You
A surprisingly good adaptation of Taming of the Shrew, it’s set in a Seattle high school and centers on a baby Joseph Gordon-Levitt trying to date a girl who’s older sister has to date before she can. Enter bad boy Heath Ledger. It’s really fun and the cast sells youthful energy very well.
Scotland, PA
MacBeth. But this time it’s set in a 1970s working class town in Pennsylvania. Instead of playing for a kingdom the players are competing for control of a McDonald’s-like fast food place. Look for Christopher Walken as a visionary fast food manager who envisions drive-thrus and keep an eye peeled for the three witches as stoners.
Prospero’s Books, the oddest movie adaptation of any Shakespeare play, let alone The Tempest – Prospero's Books - Wikipedia
I take issue with identifying Forbidden Planet with the Tempest. Even though the screenwriters said that was true, and you can draw a one-to-one identification between the characters, their motivations are completely different. Morbius isn’t Duke Prospero, cheated out of his kingdom because he neglected his earthly duties for his sorcery – Morbius, the philologist, is doing exactly what his job requires. And he’s dissuading his “Miranda” (Altaira) from getting romantically involved with the Captain, rather than encouraging it. Cookie, the Drunken Sailor, isn’t being traitorous, and, in any case, he’s carousing with FP’s Ariel, not its Caliban.
Kurosawa also did Throne of Blood, a samurai version of Macbeth.
Then there was King of Texas, with Patrick Stewart as a cowboy King Lear.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspires a lot of psychedelia, especially in TV movies. You invoke the audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief”, and cheap special effects become “surreal” instead of “shoddy”.
Then there was A Midsummer Night’s Cream, a porn film that incorporated a surprising amount of Shakespeare’s dialog.
This was on stage, but I think it may still qualify.
Stuffed Puppet Theatre’s shows consist of one man and some puppets (all of whom are given voice and motion by the one guy onstage) and that’s it. Most of the time, he was Macbeth. Other times, only the audience could see him. Besides the usual characters, there was a snake representing Macbeth’s ambition and inner voice.
I’d seen SPT once before (The one act plays Manipulator and Underdog). Those utterly blew me away.
Macbeth disappointed only in that it was very very good but fell short of being great.
I guess Romeo + Juliet, the Leo DiCaprio / Claire Danes version from 1996, can be seen as odd in a lot of ways, but damn it’s a terrific version. I don’t even like Romeo and Juliet in general (and I love Shakespeare) and I thought that was a first rate Shakespeare-on-screen work all the way.
“Strange Brew” is loosely based on Hamlet. The movie is terrible, but it’s fun in a silly way.
Hamlet (1921) – From IMDB: “Danish silent movie-star Asta Nielsen formed her own production company to make this film, in which new elements are combined with features (and a few lines) familiar from Shakespeare’s version of the legend. The most important of these changes sees Hamlet made into a female character - a princess forced to masquerade as a man by her scheming mother; from this follows Hamlet’s secret passion for Horatio and rivalry with Ophelia for his love.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) – Unique-looking film with top Hollywood talent in front and behind the camera.
Strange Illusion (1945) – B-movie version of Hamlet.
*Teenage Gang Debs *(1966) – Haven’t seen this, but supposedly based on Macbeth.
Johnny Hamlet (1968) – From IMDB: “Back from the Civil War, Johnny Hamilton learns that his father was murdered by Santana the bandit and that his mother Gertrude married his uncle Claude but Johnny is determined to find out the truth.
Black Commando (1982) a.k.a. Othello. Haven’t seen this one either. Bernie Schwartz plays Iago.
Cal, I’d say that Forbidden Planet is at least as close to The Tempest as West Side Story is to Romeo and Juliet, and that’s usually described as an adaptation, too. Sure, there are some significant differences, but there are even more significant similarities.
I think most of the Shakespeare productions I’ve seen have been at least a half-bubble off plumb. I’ve been going to the free summer performances by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company on Boston Common for the last few years. They did The Two Gentlemen of Verona and set it in Rat-Pack-era Las Vegas, and added a few songs.
But the winners have to be the shows put on by a theater company called Greek Active in Seattle in the '90s. Dan Savage (the sex-advice columnist) was their artistic director (I think), and the shows had a strong gay/lesbian/crossdressing component. In their version of Romeo and Juliet (didn’t see it, but friends described it) the Capulets and Montagues were rival lesbian softball teams. They did the shows in the back room of a bar, and for their production of King John they passed out cocktail toothpicks with British or French flags on them, and we were supposed to wave the flags for our side during the battle scenes.
I’ve mentioned them before, but there wasn’t any way to demonstrate just how much fun they were. I recently discovered some videos that have been posted. This is from their version of Macbeth. Ross was played with a laughable Scottish accent that got thicker and thicker as the play went on. By the end, he was incomprehensible, but incomprehensibly Scottish.