Friday, December 15, 2017

Musical Version of Bottom's Dream

"Bottom Dreamed a Dream." Pyramus! Unproduced Off-Broadway Musical.

Most years, I write a song that will help students review the material in my Shakespeare course.

Past hits include Bob Dylan singing the plot of Measure for Measure (for which, q.v.).

The current piece is one I put together last year—and then ran out of time to record. Students had to be satisfied with a live version.

But now we can all enjoy (?) this piece. Imagine, if you will, a new musical based on the play-within-the-play of Midsummer Night's Dream. It's called Pyramus! And this is just one of its many show-stopping numbers.


Note: In case the video above fails to embed properly, I'm attaching a blog-native version here.

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