Spike ,'Sleeper'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I ask to be
Or not to be
That is the question that I ask of me
And also
Neither a borrower nor a lender be
Do not forget
Stay out of debt
Yeah, that's in my head better than the original.
I highly recommended A Double Life by George Cukor
Oooh, that sounds right up my alley and I have not heard of it before. Excellent.
What was the name of the Doctor Who ep with Shakespeare? That was great, with the Doctor and Martha dropping Shakespearean quotes, and Shakespeare saying "That's good--I'll have to borrow that one!"
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. Good book
There's also To Be or Not to Be, one of the few Jack Benny movies (and the woeful Mel Brooks remake).
Infinite Jest, I suppose.
and the woeful Mel Brooks remake
Though I have a small soft spot even for that - I saw a short Mel Brooks TV biography right after the remake came out. In one scene, he sat in a screening room and played the bit where he and Anne Bancroft sing "Sweet Georgia Brown" together, and he talked about watching the rushes from the first couple of days of filming and boggling all over again at how gifted and extraordinarily beautiful and elegant she was, and how he'd never known just how great her singing voice was, and how nobody would ever believe someone like her could play the wife of someone like him in a movie. He was just moony over her beauty, and agog at her talent, and awestruck that out of all the people in the world she'd chosen him as her life partner.
What was the name of the Doctor Who ep with Shakespeare? That was great, with the Doctor and Martha dropping Shakespearean quotes, and Shakespeare saying "That's good--I'll have to borrow that one!"
"The Shakespeare Code."
Neither a borrower nor a lender be
Wiess College at Rice puts on Hello, Hamlet! every four years. It's a hilarious musical with filked versions of showtunes like "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ophelia?" And Polonius has a song that begins something like this:
Climb every mountain
Cross every sea
Neither a borrower
Nor a lender be
The production they put on while I was there was so great I saw it twice. They included Statler and Waldorf puppets.
Opera and ballet versions of Otello, Romeo & Juliet.
Buffy! We few, we happy few. We band of buggered.
Kiss Me, Kate
A bunch of tween/teen plays:A Midsummer Night's Midterm; Omelette, Chef of Denmark; Romeo & Harriet; Romeo & Winifred; Shakespeare's Inferno; The Taming of Katy Lou; The Taming of LaRue
Prospero's Books
Oh, a middle grade book, A Girl Named Hamlet.
Most excellent suggestions.
(None of you mentioned Wise Children by Angela Carter, though. C'mon! I left that one sitting right there for you.)
Any other songs which do more than just allude to a line but rather examine a character or scene?
Peter Brooks most famous productions were on my mind, but I'd also include the Comedy of Errors with the Flying Karamazov Brothers that played once on PBS. (It can't be released because of rights issues but it was on YouTube last I checked.)
Another notable performance (for me at least) is Ian McKellen reciting Sonnet XX (the gay sex one!) backed by a rock band (The Fuzztones playing in the style of the VU) on Andy Warhol's cable access show, on Valentine's Day. It's awesome. Also it's up at Buffistarawk if anybody needs it.
How about other poets specifically going back to Shakespeare like Keat's "Before re-reading Lear."
Oh look! There's a King-Lear.org! Heh.