acting

New Outschool Course: “An Immersive Guide To Romeo and Juliet.”

course image: Immersive Guide To Romeo and Juliet
| astronut1

I’m very proud to announce that just in time for Valentines’ Day, I’m offering a course of classes about Shakespeare’s most popular play about love. The play will include fight choreography, dramatic readings, games, escape rooms, and an activity where the students create their own Shakespearean insults!

Course Description:

We’ll engage with the play with thoughtful discussion.

You’ll go on a virtual tour to the Globe Theater!

You’ll play detective and solve a Shakespearean murder!

Instead of just reading the play "Romeo and Juliet," this class will actively delve into the world of the play through a combination of lectures, dramatic readings, virtual field trips, online quizzes and activities, and finally, a digital escape room to test the student's knowledge of the play and its ideas. Each class is ala carte, meaning that once you take one class, you choose whether to stop at one class or continue onwards. Each class will delve into a different theme, literary device, and historical concept in the play:

Class Structure:

Class 1: Why Read Romeo and Juliet?
- The teacher will decode the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet and tell the basic story of the play
- We will explain dramatic irony through looking at the prologue,
- The teacher will explain why Shakespeare used poetry in the play, instead of just writing in common prose
- We will discuss why we still read Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet in particular.

Class 2: Foils and Fights 
- The learner will learn about the culture of dueling and sword fighting that was rampant in the 17th century.
- The teacher will explain and the learner will learn to recognize character foils in the play like Romeo and Friar Laurence
- We will cover the topic of antithesis- how opposite imagery permeates the play.
- We will discuss figurative language through insults and the students will have a contest to see who can craft the best Elizabethan insults!

Class 3: Acts 1& 2- The Language of Love and Hate
- We will recap how insults work- hyperbole and metaphor used to make someone seem the worst, the smallest, the ugliest, the dumbest, etc.
- We'll examine passages from Act II that show how these techniques apply to wooing and expressing love through metaphor, hyperbole, and allusions.
- The teacher will explain what a sonnet is and how Shakespeare uses them repeatedly in "Romeo and Juliet"
- We will discuss staging the famous Balcony Scene of Romeo and Juliet and ask if it's possible to do so in a virtual environment.

Class 3:  Act 3 fighting 💪 swordplay and plague imagery 
The teacher will explain the plot structure of Elizabethan tragedies and explain that Act III is the climax of the play. 
We will recap  the events that led to the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt
The teacher will unpack Mercutio’s famous curse "A plague on both your houses," which is a foreshadowing, and the climax of the action.
The class will end with a short, safe demonstration of stage fighting where the students may choose to enact Mercutio's fight with Tybalt and/ or Romeo's fight with Tybalt.

Class 4: Act 4 antithesis and dramatic irony 
We will talk about the imagery in Act IV, scene 1, which foreshadows the end of the play. I will also do a dramatic re-enactment of Juliet's soliloquy in Act IV, 
We'll go on a virtual field trip to an Elizabethan wedding.
The teacher will historical context of the black death and its relevance to the play and Shakespeare's life.

Class 5: The final curtain
We will discuss Act V of the play and how so many forces seemed to be out of Romeo and Juliet's control, pushing them apart. We will also discuss whether or not Friar Laurence should be punished for encouraging Romeo and Juliet to disobey their parents.

Class 6: Performance then and Now
The teacher will perform in character as William Shakespeare, and teach the students how to act like real Elizabethan actors. This will include a virtual tour of the Globe Theater, a virtual costume fitting, stage fighting lessons, and DIY Elizabethan crafts. The teacher will then engage the class by discussing different adaptations, sequels, and spin-offs of Romeo and Juliet, in order to illustrate how popular and long-lasting this story is. The students will watch and discuss clips from various movies, plays, and ballets based on Romeo and Juliet. The instructor will conclude by sharing his own experience acting in Romeo and Juliet three times as The Prince, Friar Laurence, and Peter.

Class 7: 
Final project- CSI ROMEO AND JULIET STYLE
The class will play the role of a detective trying to solve the mystery of Juliet's death in Act IV, (when she actually takes the sleeping potion). (S)he doesn't know what happened but must piece together clues hidden in a digital escape room, such as handwritten notes, blog posts, receipts from "The Apothecary," etc. The clues will not only test the student's knowledge of the play, but their understanding of metaphor, verse, Elizabethan history, and more! In the end, the Detective will be the one who tells Lord and Lady Capulet the true story of what happened to Juliet. To unlock the digital escape room, the students will decode messages hidden in the clues and enter them into a Google Form.

First course runs from February 2nd to March 19th, 7PM EST. If you can’t make it to this section, I can schedule one for you.

Register here: https://outschool.com/classes/an-immersive-guide-to-romeo-and-juliet-M4EdgCM5#usMaRDyJ13

Short Review: “She’s The Man”

| astronut1

Since Twelfth Night is coming up, I’m going to review a blast from the past, the Amanda Bynes teen comedy remake of Twelfth Night called “She’s The Man”.

Poster for “She’s The Man”

Some of you might remember that the late 90s and early 2000s were the heyday of Hollywood remakes of Shakespeare: Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrman, 10 Things I Hate About You, (The Taming Of the Shrew) “O” (Othello), and even “Get Over It” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”). Shakespeare was actually hot for a few years and many writers were riding his doublet.

Sadly, not all Shakespeare remakes are created equal. Most of them were created with care to try and either show love for the text (as in Romeo and ‘O’) or to improve or contemporize the text like in ‘O‘ and “10 Things I Hate About You,” (which interestingly, both starred Julia Styles). “She’s The Man” doesn’t feel like a faithful retelling of “Twelfth NIght” despite the fact that it keeps most of the characters and the central conceit of the story- a girl disguising herself as her twin brother, going to a new place called Ilyria and inspiring love in both a powerful man and a beautiful woman.

Original Tailer for 2006’s “She’s The Man”
  • Amanda Bynes as Sebastian is a characature of 90’s bro culture and rarely ever plays her male role straight or convincingly. Nobody would be fooled into thinking this girl is a boy.
  • Bynes’ Viola rarely challenges anything or does a good job playing soccer until the end of the movie. Her main reason for her masquerade is that her brother forced to do it, so he can run away to become a musician.
  • I also don’t like that Sebastian never seems to impress or endeer the coach. If her goal was to prove that girls are just as good as guys, he should be her focus, but they rarely evershare the screen.
  • This Viola also never challengers Duke (her love interest played by Channing Tatum). One of the best parts of Shakespeare’s version is that Duke Orsino is a mopey would-be incel who puts women on a pedestal one minute, and condemns them the next. One of the best things about his relationship with Viola is that it makes him better able to appreciate women, but his counterpart in She’s All That has no such epithany.
  • I do want to give a shoutout to Laura Ramsey as Olivia . She frankly is a better actress then Bynes and plays Olivia’s unrequited love for Viola very well. Initially, she gets a copy of Sebastian’s song lyrics and she’s smitten by Sebastian’s words, rather than his looks. This makes you hope the real Sebastian will return.
  • Below is a montage of the jokes in the film. I hope you notice that most of them are very lowbrow and pretty cliche, even for teen movies. At 5:20 is the only really good part of the movie- it explains why Olivia’s love for Viola is funny and tragic. Guys are taught never to open up to women, but women want emotional connections. Men are taught women aren’t equal, but women yearn for acceptance. Viola in disguise has no concept of these unspoken ‘rules’ of male behavior, so she seems like the perfect man to Olivia- someone who treats her like an equal, isn’t afraid to open up, and is also male. The fact that she’s actually developing feelings for a woman is what makes it funny and tragic.

In conclusion, I’m kind of glad this Shakespeare rom-com is slinking into obscurity since it adds nothing and waters down the original to oceanic degrees. Frankly, I think there was a much better adaptation of Twelfth Night that, although it changed the names, location, and text, was a more thought-provoking and insightful rendition of the story- the 1996 animated film, Mulan.

Special Discounts on my Outschool Classes!

| astronut1
I'm teaching two great classes today. Spaces are available!

From now to January 13th, I’m offering a $5 discount for any class that is $10 or more! You can take my Shakespeare classes for as little as $4! Go to my Outschool.com class and enter the coupon code: HTHESNIF6B5 at checkout!

https://outschool.com/teachers/c9bc565b-71e9-44c9-894a-921c472f4a37#usMaRDyJ13

If you’re new to Outschool, use the referral code below when you sign up. You’ll automatically get $20 USD off  as a thank you to use on future classes! My referral code is: MaRDyJ13

Hope to see you on my Outschool page!

New Outschool Course: Christmas For William Shakespeare

| astronut1
Title card for my new online course, What Was Christmas Like For William Shakespeare?
The goal of this class is to learn about both Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period through the lens of Christmas. I will begin by asking the class "What traditions do you think of when you think of Christmas?  We will then contrast the traditions of Christmas from the 17th century and now, including a brief period when Christmas itself was illegal.

 Once I have contextualized this period, we will then go through the plot, characters, and themes of Shakespeare’s most famous Christmas play- “Twelfth Night.”

Slideshare presentation I made about the play Twelfth Night 
The class will include videos, multimedia presentations, virtual tours, interactive quizzes, and online activities. The students will play games inspired by real Elizabethan Christmas traditions, get some festive recipes, and learn what it was like to be an actor in Shakespeare's company, when they performed "Twelfth Night" and other plays before Queen Elizabeth and King James.
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Go See, “Voodoo Macbeth”

| astronut1

I’m very excited! As some of you know, I wrote a piece about Orson Well’s 1936 Federal Theater Project production of “Macbeth,” set in Haiti. This was an important moment in theater history, and helped keep theater and African Americans employed during the Great Depression, so it deserves to be remembered. Imagine my joy when I found out that there’s an independent movie about the creation of this show! Below is the trailer. If you go to https://www.voodoomacbethfilm.com/, you can see the screening dates. Check it out when it comes to your town!