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My dear friend and sensei, Jerry, sent me this link to a video of David Foubert and Jay Leibowitz performing Shakespeare’s “Who’s On First”.

Elizabethan vaudeville at its best:

This, of course, was not really Shakespeare cracking wise but Leibowitz himself writing a spot on imitation of how the Bard would likely have handled Abbott & Costello’s classic “Who’s On First” routine.

Here’s the original:

Elizabethan baseball aside, this sort of link being sent to me invariably results in my falling down an informational rabbit hole and coming out some other distant end awash in semi-relevant connections and sufficently distracted enough to render the rest of my day a complete fucking waste of time. Thanks, Jerry!

When ever I hear the Shakespeare I automatically revisit Bill Irwin‘s sublime The Regard Of Flight as he defends himself from a critic, brandishing a hefty volume of the Complete Works like some anti-vampiric talisman: “Shakespeare! This is unabridged, pal!”

The Regard Of Flight isn’t available commercially on tape or disk – it was distributed as part of the MacArthur Foundation Library but is now virtually impossible to get, unless you want to fork out $245 bucks via Amazon for a used copy. Luckily I have a copy I taped off the air when PBS broadcast it years ago. There are some clips available from the show on YouTube but not the relevant Shakespeare! portion. Instead I give you Doug Skinner and Bill Irwin singing the First Homesickness Song also known as Harry Warren’s “Pasadena – An American Love Song”:

I love that song and used it as our favorite lullabye for my son when he was so much younger than he is today. Skinner does a second song that is just a delight of gentle wistful longing.

My alleged mind, suffering from our Billy’s apt description of ” a malady of attention”, also skipped over to David Huband‘s wonderful award winning short script adaptation of Hamlet called “The Dane”, where the tale is told by a dying gangster in a bar. I wanted to include a snippet of that film here but it’s impossible to find anything of it online.

Richard D’Alessio directed The Dane and he and Huband went on to make more episodes collectively known as the The Shakespeare Comedy Show which was an attempt to create more of the same but was, unfortunately, not as well done as their original venture.

I could go on for hours here about Shakespeare and the myriad of adaptations of his work on stage, film and television. Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard is a brilliant examination of that particular play and the work involved in performing Shakespeare’s characters:

Equally essential is John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare series of episodes for the South Bank show. Sir Ian McKellan’s own Richard III is one of the best adaptations I’ve ever come across – better even than Olivier’s. I have a particular affection for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the less said of the 1999 version the better. I have my own adaptation sitting in a drawer somewhere that fucking rocks and will, perhaps, one day be brought to life.

Peripheral versions of Shakespeare are represented by Orson Welles’ Chimes At Midnight (which you can watch online here) and the Vincent Price thriller Theatre Of Blood which has, I believe, fallen into the public domain and can be found in its entirety in various forms online, including segments on YouTube. Here’s the first part – I love these opening credits:

My nephew Nathan is studying The Scottish Play in school this year and at the request of my sister I sent out a copy of Polanski’s film version and as many different film and television versions of all of the plays as I could gather along with Barton’s series and Michael Wood’s In Search Of Shakespeare. There’s still some holes in the collection but I am intent on filling them soon. I can hear my sister sigh even now and mutter: Yeah, right, that’ll be the day.”

Regardless of whether I’m reading the plays, seeing a stage performance, watching a film production or freely adapted version of his works, what always amazes me is how eternally relevant Shakespeare is despite the passage of time. I’m not sure if that speaks well of us as human beings but it sure as shit stands as high praise for dear William. These words from Othello perhaps do well to represent our departure from our recent past which leads us still into these troubled times.

“Farewell the tranquil mind; farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars
That make ambition virtue!”

All this was actually going to go somewhere when I started writing this blog post – there was a kernal of an idea for something worth spewing on about – but the thread has eluded me so I’ll just end this drivel with a final nod toward Billy The Shakes and the enduring power of vaudeville with The Flying Karamazov Brothers (and others) in Shakespeare’s A Comedy Of Errors:

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

Cheers.