Throughout the history of filmmaking Shakespeare's plays have been a crucible and challenge for directors who wanted to really prove how legit they were. It's a chance for someone like Ethan Hawke to spout soliloquies, Laurence Olivier to go in blackface, and in one the loosest adaptations, Julia Stiles wrote her own sonnet.
But there's Shakespeare as artistic endeavor, and then there's Shakespeare as pure commercialism. That's where we find the upcoming series from the U.K. theater company Shakespeare 4 Kidz-- if that title nauseates you, give up now-- which will be producing six 3-D musical versions of Shakespeare plays, starting with Hamlet. Unfortunately, it gets even worse-- according to Variety, they'll stage a televised, American Idol-style show to pick the leads for Romeo & Juliet.
Other plays scheduled for the chopping block are Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night and The Tempest. John Godber, who has written British plays like Bouncers, will direct Hamlet, with plans to make the 3-D ghost pop out at you from the screen. I realize it's a little ridiculous to get up in arms about Shakespeare adaptations-- people have been butchering the plays for hundreds of years, after all. But this whole thing just seems so cynical and awful, literally the opposite of art. It might be hypocritical to love 10 Things I Hate About You and dread this, but hey, that's how I feel.
