Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Bond Revisited

Bond: A Taiwan BangZi Opera Adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. Dir. Po-Shen Lu. Perf. Hai-ling Wang, Mei-li Chu, Chien-hua Liu, and Ya-ling Hsiao. Adapted by Ching-Hsi Perng and Fang Chen. Shakespeare Association of America. Bellevue, Washintgon. 7 April 2011.
Update: With significant amounts of computer jiggery-pokery, I was able to get the DVD of Bond that I bought to work. The DVD reveals that some of the elements that were cut from Shakespeare's text for the live performance I saw were not cut from a lengthier version of which this DVD is the recording. For example, at least one more suitor is included in the longer performance.

I was also able to extract part of the Shylock analogue's song about the basic humanity of the Saracens. That, more than anything, will give you a taste of the production:


That voice—and the voices of the others in the production—is simply amazing. It's so sharp that you can cut yourself on it if you're not careful.
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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.

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 —The Tempest