Thursday, April 19, 2007

Coaching with the Ed Program

Imagine that! I get back from a wonderful morning coaching high school students for their Shakespeare Festival (with several other Tavern folk) and discover that a forum for expressing my elation and excitement about the morning has magically opened up in the form of this blog! Well, that's really it - elation and excitement.

This was a festival that has voluntary participation from Clayton County High Schools. They work on scenes from Shakespeare's plays and then show up with the lines memorized, and having worked on the piece quite a bit. They do the pieces for us and we help them tweak them. Then they perform their pieces for judges. Two of us stayed for the performance and we could actually see the difference we had made. It was very gratifying, not to mention hugely entertaining. I saw the most inventive Banquo's ghost ever, for instance. And who would have thought that "Shakespearean Idol" in the form of characters from Shakespeare auditioning to play other characters from his plays (Lady M reading for Tybalt!) could be so much fun?

Watching kids get fired up about my favorite writer/philosopher/psychologist/humorist ( you could keep adding applicable titles indefinitely) is a feeling like no other. I wish everyone who loves Shakespeare and what we do at the Tavern could experience it! Thank you, Laura and Kirk!

From Jeanette in Marketing: Questions

This is the first blog entry!

I had a request from an actor. He thought it might be a good idea if people sent in questions for us to answer in this blog.

We had a place to do that on our old website and decided to not include that section on the new design, however we're very open to answering your questions.

So, if you have a question for anyone in the company: actors, directors, administration (we're fun, too!) e-mail Jeanette@shakespearetavern.com

If you want a specific actor to answer your question in the blog, just let me know who.

On another note, it seems that the one question that gets asked among the staff and actors over and over is "What's the house look like tonight?" I must say that looking back over the past season, 75-80% of the time, the house is mostly full! This weekend we're sold out tonight and Sunday and are in the mid-100's for Friday and Saturday. We seat around 200, 220 if the wind is blowing right.

I'll let Artistic Director Jeff Watkins discuss the irony of full houses in another blog.

I am grateful for our audience.