Posted in Every Day Blessings
This morning we went to the school performance of Shakespeare's As You Like It performed by the Aquila theater group and I have to say that we were well entertained and quite impressed with this show even though this is one of my less favorite plays by William. The boys thoroughly enjoyed it and even wanted to stay after the performance for the Q/A of the actors. Can you believe that out of the 250 or so kids sitting in the audience listening to the Q/A session only us and maybe 6 others had read the book before coming to the show? Who knows how many were in the theater that morning who had already left but didn't stay for the Q/A and they hadn't read the book either! No wonder these (mostly high school) kids act the way they do at these performances -- very juvenile, disrespectful and ignorant of what they are seeing. Either way my boys loved the show and even asked pertaining questions of the actors during the Q/A. If you ask any one of my boys what their favorite school subject is, they will usually say Shakespeare. Quite frankly, I think public school is doing a complete injustice by waiting until high school to present this literature, partially because of the behavior that I see from these students at these performances; they just do not appreciate the literary genius that is Shakespeare. I truly have to thank Ambleside Online for putting it into their curriculum otherwise I might also have fallen into the same trap and not started Shakespeare early. This is now the 6th or 7th play we have done of Shakespeare and I am seeing where my boys are picking up bits of Shakespeare's style in his speech, in his vocabulary, in his wording and this time even purposely memorizing favorite parts of the play. My youngest even specifically looked for a copy at the library to read along with when we got to the audio. I hope their love of this never dies and that they continue to appreciate Shakespeare's work.
If you can make it to this performance it was very cleverly done and stayed true to Shakespeare's language yet throwing some artistic twists into scenes and characters that it made this quite a wonderful performance.
