Wednesday, June 1, 2011

"The Show Must Go Off": Shakespeare and Frasier

"The Show Must Go Off." By David Angell, Peter Casey, David Lee, and Mark Reisman. Perf. Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, and Derek Jacobi. Dir. Robert H. Egan. Frasier. Season 8, episode 12. NBC. 6 February 2001. DVD. Paramount , 2006.

Frasier's use of Shakespeare isn't limited to the titularly parasitical (for which, q.v.).

In an episode that goes by the title "The Show Must Go Off," Frasier discovers, at a science fiction convention, the man who instilled a love of Shakespeare in him. Jackson Hedley (played by the famed Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi) hasn't been able to do Shakespeare since he took on the role of an android on a popular television series. The Crane brothers are determined to reward him for giving them a love of Shakespeare, and they arrange for him to do a one-man show of Greatest Hits from Shakespeare. During the process, however, they come to realize that he's a terrible actor:


The rest of the episode is equally marvelous—the Cranes realize with increasing desperation that they will be overwhelmingly embarrassed if Jacobi's character goes on, and they work with increasing desperation to prevent that eventuality from occurring.

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest