Red Barn

In the vain hope that anyone reading this blog is in the L.A. area:

The Independent Shakespeare Company usually does (obviously) Shakespeare, but they decided to branch out and make a period murder mystery tragicomic musical ... as you do.  Unsurprisingly, they bring just as much talent, charm, expertise, and pure entertainment to this as they do to their annual summer Shakespeare festival in Griffith Park.

Sample songs: Red Barn and Love

Details on the historical story on which it is very faithfully based can be found on Wikipedia.

Hamlet!

It is pretty much impossible to overstate how much I loved the Independent Shakespeare Company's production of Hamlet, though people who have to deal with me in daily life will tell you I've been giving it a pretty good try. For everyone who wishes I would just shut up about it already . . . I will draw about it instead!


This is my best attempt to mimic the style of Tron Mai, who unfortunately doesn't seem to have a blog or website to which I can link for an example, so you'll have to take my word for it. It seemed a natural fit.

Hamlet was already my favourite Shakespeare play, so I can't say this production converted me, but it is now even more my favourite, because, and I cannot all-caps this enough, IT WAS AWESOME. I wish it weren't such a cliche so I could say 'the text came alive!' and have it actually mean something, but . . . really . . . they found so much life and humour that you would not expect in a famously long and morose play about a depressed prince taking a long time to get around to killing his uncle. I am thoroughly looking forward to anything they put on in the future.