How could one place in this world seem to have everything, from classical to pop culture, for just about everyone, from tweens to the young at heart?
England’s Poet Laureate John Masefield once called “Twelfth Night” “the happiest and one of the loveliest of all Shakespeare’s plays. Mirth here is so mingled with romantic beauty that few can tire of it.”
Cris Villonco’s acting credentials are impressive for someone of her age. Barely 30 and this young woman has two Philstage Gawad Buhay! Best Actress Awards under her belt, and has had more than 30 productions with some of the leading Filipino theater companies.
After dominating the recent Philstage Gawad Buhay awards, the Philippine Education Theater Association (PETA) is bringing back the award-winning Shakespeare rap musical “William” for a special show at the Cultural Center of the Philippines this September 28.
Book review: ‘James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?’ The 2012 Olympics opening was inspired by Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The ongoing World Shakespeare Festival, which runs in the UK until November, is the biggest celebration of the Bard ever staged, featuring 70 shows in 37 languages, including “King Lear” in Belarusian, “Hamlet” in Lithuanian, and “Troilus and Cressida” in Maori. There are 319 Shakespeare theaters and centers all over the world. The man’s works are more revered and acclaimed than ever.
The Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) has emerged as the biggest winner the 2011 Philstage Gawad Buhay awards, bringing home a total of thirteen wins for two of its box office hits: “Care Divas” a comedy-drama about five Filipino transvestite caregivers in Israel who moonlight as glamorous entertainers, and the musical “William”, which familiarizes young people with the beauty of Shakespeare’s works through rap and hip-hop.
At UP High in Padre Faura, after the war, we read Shakespeare, notably Hamlet, which, like all the bard’s plays, teems with memorable passages like the soliloquies and lines from the dialogue, as when Hamlet tells his stoic friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This, after the ghost scene.
William Shakespeare has written a hundred sonnets and plays about the irony, tragedy, and splendor of love. He wrote about love from all angles, encompassing all ages, status and cultures. He has looked at love from a perspective of a desperate lover, an aging father or a loyal servant. This love month of February, Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) has three Shakespeare offerings for all love moods and persuasions.
Kevin Spacey fitting into the deformed physiology and twisted mentality of “Richard III” is much too predictable.
“What’s the point of writing an award-winning play if, for decades, it has remained a manuscript in a glass-encased air-conditioned library in Makati City or a chapter in a textbook being read by students required by their professors in Literature or Humanities class? What’s the difference between ‘literariness’ and ‘theatricality’ of a play?” On its [...]
The prospect of watching a play in a foreign language can be daunting. You never know if you’ll be bored to death or be rewarded with an experience that fires up the cells in your brain and nerves in your body. In Barcelona, we caught a Spanish translation of William Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” staged by [...]
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