Much Ado

Tonight we attended a play at the public high school: Much Ado About Will, a collection of scenes from a variety of plays by William Shakespeare.  It appealed to Susan and me due to our backgrounds as actors, directors, and English teachers (whose students read Shakespeare plays); and we've always been keen to have our children watch Shakespeare plays while they're young in order to struggle less when reading them in school in later years.  That approach has worked; cable TV offers well regarded filmed productions of Shakespearean plays, which we have recorded and watched with the girls over the years, and they generally have no trouble figuring out what the characters are saying or what's going on in the plot.

That was true tonight, too.  And I thought the high school actors did a fine job of delivering their lines with meaning, as though they were real people and not just robots uttering memorized words in the sing-song pattern of dramatic verse (can you tell that I have seen Shakespearean plays before that were poorly acted by high schoolers?).  Our favorite parts were the scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the tradesmen, in honor of the royals' wedding, put on a play intended to be a tragic love story but resulting instead in laughs by the other characters and the audience alike.  It was a fun production!