The forced romance and the pretty awful performance from the lead guy really bring it down. Everything else is fantastic
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PillowRock — 10 years ago(October 07, 2015 12:31 PM)
I don't think the problem is saying that
West Side Story
is based on Shakespeare. (Telling them something about it taking place against the backdrop of a street gang war would also set up problematic false expectations.)
I think that the problem is how kids are introduced to Shakespeare. They're plays. They're not meant to be read. They're meant to be seen enacted. Most kids wouldn't be too thrilled with modern movies either, if they were allowed only to read the scripts.
When you see Shakespeare's plays performed well, the bits of unfamiliar language aren't much of a problem. When you can see what the characters are doing and hear the intonation of their line delivery, the meaning is clear even if you don't catch some words or understand the reference of some metaphors. After the kids have the connection of having seen the story and understanding the relationships and actions, then you can go back through the script with them to explain some of the archaic language and less-well-known-than-they-used-to-be metaphorical references.
In my high school, all freshman English classes had "Romeo and Juliet" on the syllabus. I was lucky that during my freshman year of high school a local second run movie theater was showing the 1968 Zeffirelli movie version of
Romeo and Juliet
. So the high school's entire freshman class got loaded onto buses one day for a matinee showing field trip. It really did help engage a much higher percentage of those 9th graders with that play. When I took the Shakespeare semester as one of my junior / senior elective English classes (after the 9th & 10th grade standard English classes that everybody took, my school had a bunch of different optional one semester English classes of which you had to take at least 2), we saw on videotape in class a couple of the plays that we read (I remember a "Shakespeare in the Park" production of "King Lear" starring James Earl Jones). Those, too, helped make the plays feel more immediately accessible.