Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
The season for school Shakespeare shows is here.Children throughout the state are sporting Elizabethan garb and presenting 400-year-old plays for parents and peers.
"It gives them exposure to great literature and an opportunity to become it," said Shauna Tateoka, reading and language arts teacher at Reid School in Salt Lake City. There, third- through eighth-graders performed Hamlet for its annual Shakespearean festival, while younger children performed a green show.
"It's here to bring families together and to have a wonderful evening with Shakespeare and drama," she said.
For some students, the theater experience, whether as a spectator or actor, is a first.
Washington Elementary, where more than 80 percent of students are low-income and nearly half come from single-parent homes, performed its annual sixth-grade Shakespearean production this year at the neighboring Salt Lake Acting Company. Through its donations, including a lighting technician, the theater joins a widening circle of community partnerships.
"To be in a real theater stage, real lights and the whole works, just excites them to no end," said company managing director Michael Leventhal. "We're just pleased to do it."
Sets are donated or loaned by the set designer for "Touched by an Angel." A University of Utah dance student has donated choreography in past years. Local actors help kids learn lines.
But the largest donor is fifth-grade teacher Tim Bailey, who this year logged 120 hours or more condensing "Julius Caesar," shopping for costuming materials and running rehearsals for up to two hours a day, five days a week for three months.
"This may be the only chance these kids ever get to perform on a real stage," said Bailey, a former actor whose screen credits include "The Great Brain" with Jimmy Osmond and "California Gold Rush," a CBS Movie of the Week. "To give them that opportunity is something. It's hard to put a price tag on it."
Bailey, like Tateoka, condenses Shakespeare's texts into 45-minute plays. But he leaves in the language, majority of speeches and poetry and rhythm that "make Shakespeare so endearing in the first place."
He also teaches the underlying meaning and emotion common in The Bard's prose.
"For an 11-year-old to recognize that emotion and really (bring it) out in the performance, . . . to me, that's huge," Bailey said.
While the budding actors receive an on-stage lesson, the production also is a chance to build self-esteem, participate in great stories and, Bailey hopes, open the doors to a lifelong love of literature.
"These kids have enough barriers without setting intellectual ones," Bailey said. "Shakespeare is as accessible as Goosebumps (storybooks). If at the age of 12, you realize, `I can do Shakespeare,' and if Shakespeare is the epitome of the English language, what else is there to scare you?"