Shakespeare 4 Kidz News

FROM THE MIDDLESBROUGH GAZETTE WEBSITE

FAIRIES and fun, royalty and romance, magic and misunderstandings ... A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (pictured) has them all and more.

Shakespeare’s comedy gets a magical transformation from Shakespeare 4 Kidz at Middlesbrough Theatre next week.

The group’s musical version of the play has proved a huge hit every time it has toured and will be in town for eight child-friendly shows starting on Tuesday.

The production is one of six S4K titles, following on from the 2009/10 national and international hit tour of Macbeth.

Every S4K show uses the whole Shakespearean plot but uses only the most famous original lines and slots them into modern language so that everyone - even the youngest primary school children - can understand.

Adults in the audience who have previously been baffled by the Bard will also find that they can at last understand what it is all about.

There are also songs, dances and lots of spellbinding effects as the fairies create a world of wonder in the woods.

Details on 01642 815181.

Read More http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/entertainment-leisure/theatre/2010/09/17/teesside-theatre-highlights-84229-27283305/#ixzz10SPMjofM

Of all the comedy characters ever written, Bottom is surely one of the funniest. The wacky weaver from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been played by many of the greats of the theatre, all anxious to make an ass of themselves for the sake of raising a laugh.

One of the play’s Mechanicals, Bottom is enchanted by the naughty sprite Puck, who places a donkey’s head on him so that when fairy queen Titania wakes up she instantly falls in love with the hairy apparition.

Sean Luckham is playing Bottom for the second time for Shakespeare 4 Kidz.

He was born in Portsmouth and got his first taste of the magic of theatre as a 14 year old. After lessons at the Priory School he headed for the Kings Theatre in Southsea where he learnt how to be the follow-spot operator.

There he enjoyed performances by many great stars and still swoons over his memories of Judi Dench and Kate O’Mara.

These actors inspired him to join the Hampshire Specialist Drama Course then go on to tour in many shows before producing and performing in lots of productions as a Redcoat for Butlins in Bognor Regis.

Sean still lives in Bognor with his wife and three children. What do Sean’s kidz think of their dad playing Bottom?

“They love it. They think it is the norm for daddy to dress up in silly wigs and costumes, and frocks at Christmas time to play Dame in panto. They think all daddies do that!”

And why does he love playing Bottom?: “Bottom is fantastic and goes on a fabulous journey. He thinks he is everything but really he is nothing. Then he goes off into this dreamlike state and has a relationship – albeit brief! – with the most beautiful creature. Bottom certainly is changed during the play in more ways than one.”

Sean is one of S4K’s popular regular actors. He was a huge success playing Peter the servant in Romeo and Juliet – another role which featured a silly wig and Sean riding on and off stage on his scooter.

He’s usually cast as one of the funny characters, including one of the gravediggers in Hamlet and Stephano the drunken butler in The Tempest.

“My niece Sophie came to see that show with her school. She told all her classmates that I was her uncle but they wouldn’t believe her,” he laughs.

The King’s Theatre in Southsea is one of the ports of call on the spring leg of this S4K tour of The Dream and Sean is looking forward to showing his Bottom off to local audiences, friends and family on Wednesday March 11 at 10.30 and 1.20.

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FOR KIDS, OR NOT FOR KIDS

Actors take on the noble challenge of adapting the Bard for children

AN AUDIENCE in Sevenoaks will be the first to step into the dream when Shakespeare 4 Kidz returns to the Stag Theatre.
The award-winning company has performed its hit musical adaptation of A MidsummerNight’s Dream far and wide, even taking the

production to the Middle East. First produced in 1997, the show has been revived for a new national and international tour

and rehearsals will take place at the Stag Theatre this week, before a public preview is staged next Saturday.

Shakespeare 4 Kidz used the Sevenoaks theatre as its rehearsal and production base in its early days, before moving to a

theatre in Horsham when the Stag came under new management.

Now the Oxted-based company is back and looking forward to performing there again.

Julian Chenery, chief executive and director of the company, told Review he was delighted to be back in Sevenoaks and hoped

the show would continue to introduce children to the joys of the Bard.
“The best way to describe our show is that we do for Shakespeare what Oliver does for Dickens,”
he said. “Our shows were written with the original idea of being performed by schools and to get young people using as much

Shakespearean language as we could, but it would be fun too. These shows have been performed by schools in every English

speaking country in the world, as well as our own theatre company.”

When the company was set up, the ambition was to broaden Shakespeare’s audience and make his texts accessible to a younger

age group.
“The first challenge was that people would say you can’t teach Shakespeare to children in primary schools,” Chenery said.

“I’m a believerin learning things by doing them and I thought that if we could get them performing these stories, that had to be the best method. “So whether the purists like it or not, one thing we had to tackle was the language and make it more understandable. It’s a shame because we didn’t want to lose the essence of the original text, but lots of it is about vocabulary and that is still not comprehensible to young, less mature students.”

By mixing contemporary language with Shakespeare’s lyrical gems and adding a musical element, the company seems to have found a way to let children into the Bard’s magical world. This is something Chenery believes could aid their education.

“We’ve created a musical theatre format that lots of young people are very comfortable with, having seen it in movies and the theatre, so it is not a big leap,” he said. “It’s based on the original and we’ve been very faithful to the story.

“If they can understand and perform the stories while at primary school, when their language matures and they have to study him for GCSE, they will know the stories. They will also be adaptable and understand the way it was written, so they will enjoy it much more.”

With high profile figures such as Dames Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, Victoria Wood and Graham Norton sending messages of support for the new tour, Shakespeare 4 Kidz has clearly made an impact in the theatrical world. But when the playwright has been dead for nearly 400 years and his plays were written in an Elizabethan society very different to our own, is his work still relevant to today’s children?

“If Shakespeare had not been English and English had not dominated the global languages, would Britain have developed a theatre world alongside New York?” Chenery said.

“The pinnacle of English theatre is the West End and Broadway. There are lots of reasons why Shakespeare and his contemporaries gave us that. Any play or performance which has stood the test of time, whether panto or classic Greek plays, is about entertaining. The underlying basis of any society is storytelling. Whether you look at the 2010s or the 1500s, it is about entertaining the people.”

Now Shakespeare 4 Kidz has achieved one of its chief aims – getting primary school children to understand and enjoy Hamlet – the company is heading for bigger and better things. The next step will be to make all six of the company’s shows into films that will be shown all over the world, taking Shakespeare to the big screen in accessible style.

“We are looking to spread the Shakespeare 4 Kidz word in a more cost effective way,” Chenery said. “People in Australia and New Zealand will see it in cinemas and then see our work locally. Most importantly, it will be getting people to perform it themselves. It is a cultural stepping stone.”

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be at the Stag Theatre in Sevenoaks at 2pm next Saturday. Tickets cost £5/£3 or £10 for families, call 01732 450175.

International singing sensation and West End star Richard Munday swaps one crown for another with his next stage role.

He played the Bard’s murderous king Macbeth when Shakespeare 4 Kidz went on tour to Dubai earlier this year. Now he is gearing up to play king of the fairies, Oberon, in a revival of the company’s hit musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Richard, aged 31 and originally from Chepstow, is a member of the acclaimed Twelve Tenors line-up which has fans all over the world. They are a talented group of Europe's finest singers who perform some of the greatest music of the 20th century from opera to pop, swing and numbers from the shows, singing in Spanish, Italian, French, German and even Chinese.

Richard’s previous Shakespeare credits include a raunchy leather-clad Tybalt in a tour of Romeo and Juliet, which saw him riding on to the stage on a flash Honda Fireblade motorbike, and the love-struck Prince Ferdinand in S4K's The Tempest.

He took over Macbeth’s crown from Jason Lee Scott, who toured with the show in the UK. And by a quirk of Fate, both actors have played ragamuffin twin Mickey in London’s long-running musical Blood Brothers – Richard’s favourite role thus far in his career.

Now Richard is looking forward to strutting his stuff for a magical spell in the Athenian woods as king of fairyland, doing battle with his feisty wife Titania and trying to keep control over his troublesome sidekick Puck.
Says Richard: “Oberon is a wonderful, mysterious almost fantastical character and he has a lot of rhyming couplets which the actor needs to get a good grasp of!”

When he’s not performing Richard, who currently lives in Forest Hill, South London, is heavily into sport and competes in marathons and triathlons.