The Ohio Light Opera 2017 Season in 3 Panels Each!

It's almost time for my favorite light opera theatre company's season to start! The Ohio Light Opera kicks off their 2017 season this weekend. Let's see what they have in store for us this year...

We start off with a couple well-known musicals, the first being Meredith's Willson's magnum opus, The Music Man. 

So far so good. Next up is Cole Porter's Anything Goes. 

When you think about Anything Goes, you think about all the great song and dance numbers. You never think about the denouement with the dubious Chinese disguises. That's because it's stupid. 

OLO was kind enough to program the same Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that is playing at the Stratford Festival this year, so I didn't have to draw a new comic of it:

"THIS RESOLVES EVERYTHING SOMEHOW", a.k.a. the motto of most Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. I loves 'em.

From Gilbert and Sullivan to Gershwin, Primrose looks like a nice, typical, early American musical, with lots of couples getting mixed up.

Side note: I really resent drawing 3-panel plays of shows that have more than two couples in them, because it's a real pain to try and fit six or more people in a single panel. 

A lovely Ruritanian romance classic by Sigmund Romberg is up next:

There always has to be a bittersweet operetta in any OLO season to balance out all the frothy, lighthearted capering, and The Student Prince is this year's offering.

Next up is ONE OF MY FAVORITES AAAAAAAAAH I LOVE IT:

I love Countess Maritza. Apart from Die Fledermaus, it's probably my favorite of the Classical Viennese Operetta genre. The music is great and the plot is actually decent. The last OLO production of Maritza back in 2003 probably ranks as one of my top ten theatrical experiences of all time; I'm not even joking.

OK, next up we have this hot mess: 

Don't ask me any questions about this one. I have absolutely no answers, but it's currently in the running for this season's Stupidest Plot in a Musical or Operetta award. I absolutely can't wait to see it. If it's half as stupid as Herbert's Dream City and the Magic Knight, it'll be a real winner. 

And that's the Ohio Light Opera's 2017 season! If you're in Midwest, seriously think about checking them out - they've perfected the art of balancing the madcap stupidity and unapologetic melodrama of operetta and early American musicals, and it's always a delight to watch them. I can't wait to visit them in August!

Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival

In other news, I will be exhibiting at the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival (nee Kids Read Comics) this weekend! Stop by the downtown Ann Arbor District Library between 12:00pm and 5:30pm on Saturday and Sunday and say hello! I will be selling the usual t-shirts, posters, and comic books. It's going to be a lot of fun!

tumblr_inline_oq23k07zJ21qabace_500.jpg

The Stratford Festival 2017 Season... in 3 Panels!

Spring is in the air, which means the Stratford Festival's season is getting underway, so it's about time for me to put together a handy guide to the plays that will be appearing on their myriad stages this year. This season the theme is "Questions of Identity".

We start with one of my all-time favorite musicals:

Then we have one of my all-time favorite piratical swashbucklers:

And then this play. I guess it's a classic of some sort, I dunno...

From Shakespearean classic to Gilbert and Sullivan classic:

I've written a theme song for this next play. It goes like this: "Who lives in a hole and acts quite beastly? SPONGETIMON ATHENSPANTS! Embittered and dirty and misanthropic is he. SPONGETIMON ATHENSPANTS!"

Then, for all your gender-bending needs, we have what is probably my favorite Shakespearean comedy:

It may seem like writing a three-panel summary of a play is a fairly straightforward endeavor. Unfortunately, this is only true when the play itself is relatively straightforward, unlike our next offering:

"After many confusions" is code for "too much stupid stuff happened for me to adequately distill in this format."

Then it's time for a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Thomas Middleton:

There's a whole complicated subplot that I haven't even bothered to address here. Anyways. Keeping with the "bodies everywhere" theme, we have this classical offering:

Up next are a couple of new plays, so I may not be 100% accurate with these summaries. First is a follow-up to The Last Wife, Kate Hennig's play about the life of Katherine Parr. This one revolves around a young Elizabeth I and her highly-problematic relationship with Thomas Seymour:

The Breathing Hole is another new play by Colleen Murphy. I may not have all the details right, but the important thing to remember here is that it stars a polar bear.

These two new Canadian plays are followed by a pair of French plays, one classic:

...and one a bit more contemporary:

The final play of Stratford's season is The Komagata Maru Incident. It's framed in a very metatheatrical way, which I'm going to totally skip over here and just tell you what is being metatheatrically portrayed. 

(Stick figures don't do "metatheatrical" very well....)

And that's the Stratford Festival's 2017 season! Speaking of which, I will be participating in the Festival's Forum this season as part of a panel entitled "Willy Shakes: Fanboy". Here are the details:

WHO: Me and the Kill Shakespeare guys (Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery)
WHAT: A panel discussion on Shakespeare, comics, graphic novels, and whatever else.
WHEN: Tuesday, September 6, 10:45am
WHERE: The Chalmers Lounge at the Avon Theatre, Stratford, ON
WHY: Because they asked me to and it sounded really cool.
HOW: You can check out the details and buy tickets online!

If you're in the Stratford area, I hope to see you there!

My Plot (a Shakespearean Hamilton parody)

Dear old Shakespeare's birthday/deathday is coming up this Sunday! To celebrate, I've written him a little song.

....OK, I've stolen a song from Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton and then rewritten all the lyrics. 

20170420-MyPlot.jpg

I'm Hunchbacked (a Hamilton parody)

I had a lot of fun putting together a Hamlet-themed  Hamilton parody of "Wait for It" a month ago, and, as one cannot desire too much of a good thing, I've gone ahead and done another one. From one English king to another...

(Here's the song it's based on, if you haven't heard it yet, sung by King George III to the American colonies.)

You'll Be Back
Jonathan Groff, Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton

Thanks again to Dan Beaulieu of the Seven Stages Shakespeare Company and No Holds Bard Podcast for being my sounding board on this comic. 

If you like Shakespeare/musical theatre mash-ups, be sure to also check out The Sound of Hamlet and Into the (Shakespearean) Woods!

Shakespeare Flowchart Poster News!

Hamleton: Wait For It

OK, so I'm over a year late to get on the Hamilton bandwagon. I've been geeking out about it from afar but only recently made the time to actually sit down and listen properly to the whole thing. 

It's hardly revolutionary (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) to make a connection between Hamilton and Hamlet. Hamilton's creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, got the ball rolling with this recorded encounter:

Well, I've never met a musical number that I haven't wanted to at least try to parody, so I thought I'd take a song from Hamilton and rework it a bit... into Hamleton. It was not easy, as Miranda's lyrics are very dense and intricate, and I'm not entirely sure I've succeeded, but here it is anyways. Many thanks to Dan Beaulieu of the Seven Stages Shakespeare Company and No Holds Bard Podcast for acting as Lyrical Dramaturge on this effort. 

(Here's the song in question, if you've somehow managed not to listen to Hamilton yet.)

Wait For It
Leslie Odom, Jr., Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton
Write here...

COMING SOON* TO A WEBCOMIC NEAR YOU: Cordelia... Goneril... and Regan... the Le-ar Sisters!

*may or may not be coming soon

If you like Shakespeare/musical theatre mash-ups, be sure to check out The Sound of Hamlet and Into the (Shakespearean) Woods. 

The Ohio Light Opera 2016 Season in 3 Panels Each

We take a break from our regularly scheduled romp through Twelfth Night for a musical interlude!

OK, OK, I'm a big Shakespeare person. Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare. But honestly, if you excavate the layers of my theatrical soul, the bedrock and very foundation of it is operetta, and nothing fulfills my operetta yearnings quite so much as a week at the Ohio Light Opera. As of tomorrow, all seven of their shows, ranging from operetta to early American musical, will be open, and I will be traipsing down there with my family next week to SEE ALL THE SHOWS. 

"But what shows are these?" I hear you ask. Well.. let me tell you...

Our first show is one that will be familiar to most Shakespeare fans. With lyrics and music by Cole Porter, Kiss Me Kate is a wonderful blend of Shakespearean send-up and back-stage antics. One of my favorite musicals.

SAMPLE SONG: Brush Up Your Shakespeare.

I've never actually seen Annie Get Your Gun (with lyrics and music by the marvelous Irving Berlin) but I know at least half the songs already and can do a terrible Ethel Merman impression whilst singing them.

SAMPLE SONG: Anything You Can Do.

OK, let's get this out of the way: I am a person of Asian extraction who loves Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Yes, a Victorian comic opera set in Japan is problematic. I see both sides of the issue, but, at the end of the day, I grew up with this music and I love it. Gilbert and Sullivan is in my blood. 

SAMPLE SONG: Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day.

Have a Heart is one of several collaborations between composer Jerome Kern and lyricist (and general literary wit) P.G. Wodehouse. It debuted in 1917, is hardly ever performed nowadays, and, as far as I can tell, has an incredibly stupid plot typical of this era of musicals.

SAMPLE SONG: Couldn't find one on YouTube, which is a pity. There's a song called Napoleon which sounds wonderfully stupid. 

Ah! Now this one I have seen. La Vie Parisienne, with music by Jacques Offenbach, has (wait for it) an incredibly stupid plot. I've seen it before at least twice (once at the Ohio Light Opera and once on film) and the only thing I remember is that some guy sings about being from Brazil and another guy's coat splits down the back when he bows over.

I have a Sadler's Wells English recording and it has a song with the immortal lyrics "Her petticoats go frou frou frou, her little feet go tok tok tok, her petticoats go frou frou frou frou frou frou frou frou frou frou frou." Which tells you all you need to know about Offenbach, really.

SAMPLE SONG: Votre Habit à Craqué Dans le Dos (Your Coat is Splitting Down the Back). 

This here is classic, self-indulgent, melodramatic light opera plot stuff here. I'm looking forward to it mainly because it's by Welsh songwriter and (later) movie star Ivor Novello, whom you may recall was played with great panache by Jeremy Northam in Gosford Park. I mostly know Novello from his famous World War I song Keep the Home Fires Burning.

SAMPLE SONG: I Can Give You The Starlight.

I have to say, one of my favorite operetta composers is hipster's choice Emmerich Kalman. His Countess Maritza remains one of my favorite operettas of all time. You can always count on Kalman to have a spirited gypsy csardas somewhere in his work. I know absolutely nothing about The Little Dutch Girl except it sounds like such a typical operetta plot and I'm assuming there will be gypsies involved somehow.

SAMPLE SONG: I have no idea! 

And that's the Ohio Light Opera's 2016 season! If you're at OLO, keep an eye out for me and come say hello! I'll be there throughout the symposium week, soaking up all the light opera goodness.

The Frozen Winter's Tale

Chalk this one up under the heading of "Things That Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time But Now I'm REALLY Not So Sure". Apart from the winter theme, I'm not sure what Disney smash-hit Frozen and Shakespeare weird-late-romance The Winter's Tale have in common. LET'S FIND OUT!!!

Good Tickle Brain at the Folger!

FolgerLecture.jpg

Just a reminder that I will be giving a FREE pre-show talk at the Folger Shakespeare Library on April 29 at 6:00pm! 

This is going to be a lot of fun, so if you're in the D.C. area, please do stop by and say hello! I will have merch available for purchase and will be hanging around after the talk to sign stuff and chat.

For details, as well as info on how to reserve your FREE ticket, please visit the Folger website. 

The Stratford Festival 2016 Season... in 3 Panels!

If theatre is my drug, then the Stratford Festival is my dealer. Here's what they've got on the playbill for their upcoming season:

The only thing I really don't like about A Chorus Line is every time I do any work related to A Chorus Line, I immediately get the song "Tits & Ass" stuck in my head for the next several hours. 

It's the play adaptation of the movie about a play! I'm looking forward to this. 

Classic. Can't go wrong. Unless, you know, someone says MACBETH...

I'm going to make an effort to see this, even though I am decidedly not an Arthur Miller fan. Everyone always spends too much time being acerbically miserable for my tastes. 

I love the Narnia books, so I'm always excited to see a stage adaptation of its first installment. Because MAGIC. 

This season's production is set in Newfoundland. If you wanted to, you could sign up to be taught a traditional Newfoundland dance and then be invited up during the performance to dance it with the cast. I thought about it briefly, and then I remembered (a) I can't dance, and (b) even if I could dance, the thought of dancing in front of actual people is such an alien concept that my mind can't even begin to process it. 

I love Sondheim. People often call Sondheim the Shakespeare of our age, which isn't really fair because, let's face it, Sondheim hasn't killed nearly as many characters as Shakespeare has. But I love Sondheim. Don't get me started. I will sing at you. 

The first part of a two-part adaptation by Graham Abbey of Richard II, Henry IV part 1 & 2, and Henry V. While I love the history plays in all their lengthy and occasionally long-winded gloriousness, I'm really looking forward to this. 

I mean... four history plays for the price of two! I'm hoping Abbey goes ahead and puts together Death of Kings, condensing the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. MOAR HISTORY PLAYS PLEEZE.

..yeah, I got nothing. Pretty sure she doesn't actually turn into a giant rabbit, though. Oh well.

This will be... I think only my second time seeing Moliere on stage. I read Tartuffe in high school, but somehow haven't gotten around to seeing it, and I saw The Misanthrope at Stratford a couple years back. This one sounds like a lot of fun. 

AAARRGGH IBSEN. I pretty much loathed reading A Doll's House in high school and have avoided his stuff like the plague ever since. Should probably actually see Ibsen in performance at least once before I slam that door shut, though. 

OK, so this is a new, contemporary adaptation of the Aeneid, so I have no idea how accurate this is, but there should be people fleeing a thing and journeying to another thing at the very least.

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY, STRATFORD... oh, wait. You're already doing that.

Good Tickle Brain at the Folger Shakespeare Library!

On Friday, April 29 I will be giving a free pre-show talk at the Folger Theatre in Washington D.C., ahead of a performance of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's performance of William Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (abridged). If you're in the D.C. area, stop by and say hello! For full details, visit the Folger website.