This is Shakespeare!? was the first show I produced for YTG and was my first show in Japan. It was the culmination of a project I started in Canada, and had become a real labour of love.
The idea was to source bowdlerized (re-written, usually to suit the tastes and mores of the times) Shakespeare and to perform it, often side-by-side with the original version, to comic effect. The show climaxes with an original re-written happy ending to Romeo and Juliet which attempts to take all the ‘lessons’ learned from previous adaptations.
As the director and writer, it was my job to make sure the show kept moving and didn’t bore the audience, which was difficult to do given the density of some of the purple prose!
