Much Ado About Nothing is by far my favorite Shakespeare play. I love most of his others too (especially Twelfth Night, Macbeth, & Romeo and Juliet), but this play is special. It’s fun to watch/read but surprisingly complex. If you haven’t ever seen/read it, I highly recommend starting with the Branaugh movie version and then reading an annotated copy. I actually own the dramatized audio version with David Tennant and Samantha Spiro, so I really like listening while I read along in hard copy. They’re […]
Read this before the movie comes out, Part II
The Chancellor, as a high school English teacher and aficionado of mid-to-late twentieth century American drama, is more well-versed in plays than I am in most time periods. When he heard that August Wilson’s Fences was being turned into a film with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis (also known as The Queen, can we just give her a damn Oscar already???), he freaked out. And then he was startled when I confessed that I had never read or seen it. So he put it into […]
They’re Just These Two Guys, You Know?
The Read Harder Challenge this year included a task to read a play. I never really enjoy reading plays, and I have read quite a few over the years. In high school, as an IB kid, I read no less than 10 Shakespeare plays. It was… grueling? It is this particular understanding of myself that made me immediately turn away from the idea of studying to be a dramaturg while my friend Gina was in grad school at Yale. But, I signed up for the […]
There’s almost no way this book could have succeeded. But it mostly does.
I won’t recount all the ways I love the Harry Potter books, but I will say that after having read this, I want to go back and read the series again. Barely a month after finishing it for probably the fifth time. My love for this world, and these characters, is indelible. Needless to say, I highly anticipated Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Don’t mistake my delayed review as lack of enjoyment or diminished excitement – I did everything I could to savor these pages. […]