Dysfunctional families, messed up relationships, eccentric characters, and ghostly presences. If it sounds Shakespearean, it’s because it is.
Yes! Shakespeare, an original work of musical theatre conceived by local educators and put on by local youth, launches its three-performance run at the River Run Centre on Thursday.
Show times for the It’s Happening Theatre Productions show on Thursday, Friday and Saturday are 8 p.m. It happens in Co-operators Hall.
The play is about the huge challenge of making Shakespeare relevant to youth in the digital age. And the moral is, Shakespeare is as relevant today has it was hundreds of years ago, says teacher Aaron Duncan, who co-authored the musical with fellow teacher Heather Walker.
Walker and Duncan wrote the original version of the show about nine years ago as a school project. At that time the music was all borrowed, but it has since become all original.
“We did the show and just received a lot of really positive feedback,” Duncan said. “Other drama teachers and playwrights saw the show and assumed we purchased it from somewhere. They said we should do it again.”
Walker and Duncan knew they would have to come up with original music if they hoped to do the production on a professional stage, and so Duncan did just that. The cast has grown significantly, as have the production values.
“Things like texting wasn’t invented yet when we first did it,” Duncan said. “We had to recreate a note-passing scene using text messaging.”
Anyone who has taught Shakespeare to young people knows that the subject can be a hard-sell to youth schooled in contemporary language, with contemporary attention spans. And anyone who has ever had to take Shakespeare in school knows it largely hedges on the enthusiasm of the teacher whether it sinks in or not.
“The story is about learning Shakespeare,” Duncan said. “It follows what we describe as the grade 9 English class from hell. We have this wonderful caricature of a teacher who is kind of the eccentric English teacher that everybody had at some point in high school.”
Anyone watching will soon realize how impossible it is to teach Shakespeare to high school students, he said.
Yes! Shakespeare revolves around the relationships formed in that Shakespeare class from hell. The teacher makes unreasonable demands on his students, and as they struggle to meet deadlines and expectations their lives begin to echo the themes of Shakespeare’s famous plays. A faux love triangle develops among the students, in true Shakespearean fashion.
When characters from Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, Romeo, and Lady Macbeth, begin making appearances on stage, scenes from Shakespeare get a whole new treatment. And Shakespeare becomes very relevant for the students.
The play incorporates various musical genres, including rock, reggae, soul and funk, with an eight-piece pit band driving the musical. While the story follows the lives of three main characters, there are over 20 performers involved, most of them teenagers. The principle setting is the high school classroom.
Yes! Shakespeare was the subject of a recent Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign in which 54 backers raised $3,000 for production costs.
Tickets are $29.50 for adults and $24.50 for students, and are available at the River Run Centre box office.
