The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0434 Tuesday, 3 July 2007
From: Tanya Gough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 3 Jul 2007 11:22:02 -0400
Subject: Events in Stratford (Ont)
If you're planning to be in the area in August, the Stratford Music
Festival will be featuring the Duke Ellington Orchestra will be in town
on August 6, performing Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder, a jazz
composition he wrote specifically for Stratford and based on the works
of William Shakespeare. It's the 50th anniversary of the composition.
For more details, please visit http://www.stratfordsummermusic.ca/
Cheers,
Tanya Gough
The Poor Yorick Shakespeare Catalogue
www.bardcentral.com
[Editor's Note: For anyone further interested in the Ellington-jazz and
Shakespeare connection, long-term SHAKSPER member Fran Teague has three
recent pieces:
1. "Beards and Broadway: Shakespeare as Unacknowledged Agent."
<I>Upstart Crow</I> 25 (2005): 4-15. [WSB Annotation: Explores Broadway
musical comedies in which Shakespeare as a cultural icon serves "a beard
for transgressive desires about race or female independences." Praises
the fidelity of Play On! (based on Twelfth Night) and Swingin' the Dream
(based on Midsummer Night's Dream) to historical truths about the Harlem
Renaissance and argues that the two musicals address the cultural and
social obstacles imposed upon women singers in the 1930s as well as
celebrate "the triumphant force of American culture" through swing music
and dancing.]
2. "Swingin' Shakespeare from Harlem to Broadway." <I>Borrowers and
Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation</I>. 1, no. 1
(2005). [WSB Annotation: Focuses on the 1939 musical Swingin' the Dream,
an adaptation of Midsummer Night's Dream.]
3. <I>Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage</I>. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006. ix + 221 pp. [WSB Annotation: Examines
America's preoccupation with Shakespeare, specifically his presence in
popular entertainment during the founding of the nation, during the
nineteenth century, and within America's quintessential theatrical form,
the Broadway musical. Emphasizes the way that American culture
transformed Shakespeare, especially through his use in political,
theatrical, and domestic realms. In an appendix provides production
information on twenty-one Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals based on
Shakespeare from 1908 to 1999.]
Enjoy, Hardy]
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