Heads Up

Okeydoke. Time to plug some colleagues...

First and foremost, there's the very important Pretentious Festival Blog - "The Official Blog of the Most Important Theater Festival on Earth" This, mind you, is the blog by the theater that is presenting the festival, which is also presenting The Impending Theatrical Blogging Event, curated by the Brick's own Michael Gardner at which "the New York community of theater bloggers blog about themselves as a theatrical event, live, at the theater, while blogging on their laptops. All blogs are projected onto a large blog screen. Audience members are encouraged to comment on the commentators' commentary and blog about it afterwards." Phew!

And then, there's our Hamlet brother in the Festival, Ian W. Hill, who designs, directs and stars in Ian W. Hill's Hamlet, his 50th production, 10 years to the month after his first! From his description on the Festival Site (the only one that was, ahem, allowed more than 100 words, but who's counting): "Hill guides a cast of eighteen [yes, that's 18 - we can barely coordinate 7 people!] through a ruthlessly and idiosyncratically cut version of the play, being faithful to an idea of the play, while having no respect for the tradition around it." Sounds way fun and if having seen Ian perform in a reading of a play by our mutual friend, raconteur and iconoclast extraordinaire TravSD (who, by the by, is also in the Festival with his show Nihils) in Coney a few weeks ago is any indication, it most definitely will be! Ian has his own tremendous blog. (Oh, and that reminds me... Hope your mouth is recovering, Ian - ouch!)

Finally, there's my friend and Shakespeare scholar William Niederkorn's article in the New York Times last Sunday about a survey of college professors and the "authorship question." The overall result: "Here's good news for Stratfordians as they celebrate the Bard’s birth, on April 23: Professors believe in him." Bravo, William. PR being PR, I can't of course plug William without also (again) plugging his splendid review of our splendid show when we did it last year.

Finally, finally, I got a voicemail today from Tim Sheridan who produced and acted Horatio in the Q1 Hamlet at Theatre of Note in L.A. in 2003, with Kathleen O. Irace - editor of The First Quarto of Hamlet, the version we worked from, as their dramaturg. He's very excited to talk about his experience and to "get in touch with Kathy" (whom it would be great to engage). I, of course, am really looking forward to talking to him/them. Based on his message, he is just as excited about this much and falsely maligned version as we are.