Airplane:

“What’s his problem?”

“That’s Lieutenant Hurwitz. Severe shellshock. Thinks he’s Ethel Merman.”

(The misspelling of Merman’s surname in the YouTube clip above is not my fault.)

Some Like It Hot: Features an actual vaudevillean, Joe E. Brown. Plus Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag. Plus Marilyn Monroe playing a ukulele. Of course it was made into a stage musical, and when Tony Curtis went into one of its regular downturns, he toured in it—in the Joe E. Brown role.

The Speed of Thought: Wallace Shawn in a supernatural thriller.

OMG! The Top 50 Incidents in WWE History: Pro wrestling tournaments are the medicine shows of our time.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop: The live show precipitated by the host having downtime between television talk shows.

The Man Who Cried: Before Sally Potter became a film director, she did dozens of dance and movement pieces as a performer and choreographer.

For Colored Girls: Considering the age and era of the original material, this is a surprisingly respectful film adaptation. Director Tyler Perry, of course, came up through live theater.

Deuces Wild: Dig this description: “It’s West Side Story minus the earnest balladeering when a war breaks out on the streets of Brooklyn, circa 1958.”

Exorcismus: All exorcism flicks are ritual theater.

Gotta Dance: Documentary about senior citizens become a hip-hop dance squad for the New Jersey nets.

Strange Powers: Documentary about Stephan Merritt: bandleader of Magnetic Fields, songwriter of the showtuney 69 Love Songs, contributor of original songs for the Series of Unfortunate Events audiobooks, co-creator of a musical theater trilogy with Chen Shi-zheng and composer of the Off Broadway musical based on Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.

Karl Rove, I Love You: Actor Dan Butler sets up to mock the right-wing icon with a one-man stage show, but begins to respect Rove instead.

Discovering Hamlet: Doc about Derek Jacobi helming a stage production of Hamlet starring Kenneth Branagh—Jacobi’s first directing gig, passing the torch to Branagh just as he’s readying his own Henry V.

The Arbor: Conceptual documentary about a subject deserving of such a different approach, experimental playwright Andrea Dunbar. Filmmaker Clio Barnard has professional actors interpret scripted interviews with Dunbar’s family.

The Devil’s Muse: Yet another film based on the Black Dahlia murder. The victim, Elizabeth Short, was an actress.

Vibrations: James Marshall plays a musician who loses his hands in a car accident when on the brink off rock fame. Christina Applegate plays a computer artist who reinvents the handless performer as “Cyberstorm.”

Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason: Interviewees include Israeli playwright David Grossman and actor/playwright Will Power (The Seven).

Vereda Tropical: Manuel Puig, who wrote almost as many plays and screenplays as he did novels, is portrayed by Fabio Aste in this story about the writer’s move to Brazil from his native Buenos Aires to avoid persecution for his homosexuality.

From Russia With Love: The James Bond one with Lotte Lenya in it, brandishing a poison boot (not to mention this gun).

One final performance, 7 p.m. Aug. 27 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org. Playing in repertory with the same troupe’s “Shake-It-Up Shakespeare” musical adaptation of Hamlet (7 p.m. Aug. 26).

Having seen this same Summer Youth Theatre ensemble’s rock theater rendition of Hamlet the previous night, I hied back to Long Wharf Stage II Thursday to see how they fared with an original piece (co-written by director Annie DiMartino, music director Carol Taubl and five of Taubl’s children). The stage set-up is identical—a live band at the back of the stage, a useful high platform and several lower platforms on a floor-level playing area. All the performers are high-school aged. All sing, several dance, and some join the band for the lusher string-laden songs.

Thematically, Threads of a Spider Web is a downer—more so than the group’s Hamlet, in the way that it dwells on the emotional after-effects of unthinkable family tragedies more. The songs, many monologues and much of the plot is concerned with loss and how to cope with it. As with Hamlet, the teen cast members play two generations of characters, though this time the ranks are enlivened with a young boy who plays an ill-fated five-year-old.

Where the SYT’s Hamlet let Shakespeare’s dialogue flow directly into lyrics by Queen, Eveanescence and Leonard Cohen, this show lets recitations of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other famous poems prepare you for affirmative original soft-rock ballads. There’s less sonic variety than in the Hamlet, but the consistency of tone works for a show with such heavy themes. Staging-wise, Threads of a Spider Web is stylized down to the style of eyeglasses (heavy black frames) which several of the actors wear. It’s casualness and youthfulness is carefully calculated.

There are tragic circumstances involving two of the characters in particular, but all suffer in various ways. While the talk of death and heartbreak will be harrowing for some, the issues which are most relatable to audiences the same age as the teenage cast—worrying about being popular, being tormented by siblings, moving too fast into a longterm relationship—are tastefully and instructively handled. The often beautiful, neatly harmonized musical score underscores the central themes of perseverance and acceptance. The point of trusting one’s inner spirit is driven home not just through poetic muses such as Coleridge, Emily Dickson, William Wordsworth but through other spiritual muses who guide the central mortal characters through their disputes and confusions. Ultimately there are twice as many of these angel characters as there are living ones. The show gets rather crowded with all that spiritual guidance.

Given the preponderance of death and depression, Thursday’s audience was eager to lighten up when allowed, and James Taubl received big laughs for this pop-and-lock dance moves as the muse of “Matt,” played by James’ real-life twin Jeremiah. I found Anthony Rockford, an impressive Gravedigger in the Summer Youth Theatre’s Hamlet, to be an equally warm, upbeat and measured voice in Threads (the guy honestly interacts with whoever else is onstage), though he has considerably less to do than the main characters and their respective muses and/or mentors.

Threads of a Spider Web, a work in progress just getting on its feet before audiences, still shows the sort of unnecessary repetitions and overstatements which mark a lot of new work. What’s notable is the confidence and aplomb of the young cast, who flit through this dour narrative gently and knowingly, aware of its pitfalls. There are some gorgeous singing voices to be heard here, and some charming performances all around. It’s all rather Rent-like, without the Bohemianism. A key lyric for the grieving: “Today is Yesterday Tomorrow.”

The curtain call of the first performance of Summer Youth Theatre's "Shake-It-Up Shakespeare" adaptation of Hamlet, at Long Wharf Stage II. Snapped furtively on my iPhone.

Final performance 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 26 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org. Playing in repertory with Threads of a Spider Web (7 p.m. Aug. 25 & 27).

Strangely, this is not the first time I’ve heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” performed live in its entirety by high school students as part of a summer theater program in Long Wharf’s Stage II space. The last time was over 15 years ago. There is nothing new under the sun.

On the other hand, it’s the first time I’ve heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” done by the Players in Hamlet, rewritten to fuel the plot thus:
Mama, I’ve just killed a man
Poured some poison in his head…

And I can categorically state that I’ve never before heard the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father intone “I Used to Rule the World” a la Coldplay. That same band’s “42” is also sung, along with a couple songs each by Evanescence and Death Cab for Cutie, the June Carter Cash/Merle Kilgore classic “Ring of Fire,” The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” (delivered here by the young women playing Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern), the Jack’s Mannequin dirge “Dark Blue” (its sea imagery underscoring Hamlet’s fraught ship voyage to England) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (which here provides a play-ending soliloquoy for Horatio).

Oh, and the stomps and claps of another Queen song (the band, I mean, not Gertrude), “We Will Rock You,” punctuate the culminating duel of Hamlet and Laertes , who snarl the “Buddy, you’re a…” lyrics while violently stabbing at each other with violin and cello bows.

I don’t mean to make The Long Wharf Theatre’s Summer Youth Theatre Series production of Hamlet sound campy or forced. The show’s played straight and somber, shadowy and sincere. The teen actors show considerable talent. What’s most impressive is how fluidly this rock-theater rendition of Hamlet plays.

Impressive, though not exactly a surprise. There’s a rich tradition of classics being studded with modern music, dating back to at least the 1960s, though I’m used to it being more of a college phenomenon than a high school one. At Harvard University in the 1980s alone, there was Bill Rauch’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (which brought in country & western songs along with Rodgers & Hammerstein) in 1984 and Alek Keshishian’s Wuthering Heights (subtitled “A Pop Myth” and infused with songs by Madonna, Kate Bush, Sting and others) in 1986.

The Summer Youth Theatre’s Hamlet features complete musical theater performances, integrated into the Shakespeare text with the accompaniment of an onstage band of keyboards, percussion, electric bass and a hard-working string section. Several of the actors double as musicians.

Of the 18 kids in the cast, five were in a similarly styled Shake-It-Up Shakespeare production of Taming of the Shrew last year. Three of those five—Jack, James and Jeremiah Taubl—are offspring of the Summer Youth Theatre’s musical director, Carol Taubl. This year they’re joined by their older brother Jack, so that various Taubls handle the roles Laertes, Horatio and both Hamlets (prince and ghostly dad),. Whatever those casting decisions may lack in, say, variety (those Taubl boys all look frighteningly alike; two of them are twins) may be gained back in the sheer delight the brothers seem to have in pummeling each other in the fight scenes.

There’s the usual youth-theater complication of teens playing the parents of other teens. The universal code of how older men are supposed to look—dour expressions and business suits—is applied for Claudius (Erik Van Eck) and the Ghost (Jack Taubl). As the dead characters in the play mount up, they all go sit underneath the high platform which serves as Elsinore’s tower. To older viewers like myself, the sight of nine teens brooding in a corner resembles a detention room scenario, or perhaps the “jail” in a game of Kick the Can.

But strong examples of creative problem-solving throughout this show outweigh such understandable and unavoidable obstacles as teens happening to look their age. Mostly, what happens when you strip down the stage to black-box essentials, stick a musical ensemble at the back of it, and insert pop songs into the soliloquoies and swordfights, is that the key moments of the play are cleanly delineated and plainly pronounced. The result is simply good scenework, an honest and brisk interactions between focused actors handling the Shakespearean scansion remarkably well.

Hamlet premiered last night, and has its second and final performance Friday, Aug. 26 at 7 p.m. A whole other Summer Youth Theatre series show, Threads of a Spider Web, opens tonight (Thursday) at 7 p.m. and has its second performance Saturday. Threads utilizes the same cast, stage set-up and theater/music mix as Hamlet, this time in service of a compendium of poems by Shakespeare, Dickenson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, informing a narrative about a family coping with the loss of loved ones in a car crash.

Annie DiMartino who adapted Hamlet, created Threads of a Spider Web and directed both shows, explained to me in a phone interview last month that the Summer Youth Theatre Series is “not a class. There’s no tuition. The kids really do audition.” There’ve been 15 hours of rehearsal a week since mid-July.

DiMartino incorporated modern pop music into the plays so as to give the young actors a quick handle on their characters’ motivations, and to further their input by having more mutural reference points. “They’d say ‘Oh, I love that song,’ and explore the connections. Like last year, when we piloted this project, and this year, doing two shows, I’m just awed.”

Despite consistent themes of death and despair, DiMartino considers both showsto be “totally appropriate for a youth ensemble. In cutting Hamlet (which still runs two and a half hours, what with all those songs in there), she says she aimed to “cut out the political commentary, and made it about family: Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet is very dark, with the ghost, revenge, death. Threads of a Spider Web is more hopeful. It’s a nice balance for the cast.”

A Bohemian rhapsody, if you will.

Comic Tragedies was copywritten 1893 by Anna B. Pratt but the title page says “Written by ‘Jo’ and ‘Meg’ and acted by the ‘Little Women’.” A foreword by Meg (not in quotes this time) and dated “Concord, Mass. 1893” reminds the reader of how, in Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women, the sisters would write and stage plays for their own amusement, then explains:
From the little stage library, still extant, the following plays have been selected as fair examples of the work of these children of sixteen and seventeen. With some slight changes and omissions they remain as written more than forty years ago by Meg and Jo, so dear to the hearts of many other “Little Women.”
We then are presented with complete, multi-act scripts for:
Norna; or The Witch’s Curse
The Captive of Castile; or, The Moorish Maiden’s Vow
The Greek Slave
Ion
Bianca: An Operatic Tragedy
The Unloved Wife; or, Woman’s Faith

I had a copy out for months from the invaluable Institute Library, a private lending library here in New Haven. Nabu Press issued a glossy covered paperback last year for $24.20. But Comic Tragedies is also easily available on Project Gutenberg and other book-archive sites. It has even been recorded for LibraVox.

Scholarly commentary on the book is relatively scarce, considering the scads of theses that have been written about Little Women. Is Comic Tragedies a literary fabrication or as advertised, the actual works that inspired one of the imaginative highlights of Alcott’s famous novel?

Christine Anne Alexander and Juliet McMaster, in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf appear to have the straight dope:

In 893, Anna Alcott Pratt published some of these amateur dramatics… Here, with editorial changes, were the real prototypes of the dramatics portrayed in Little Women. Unfortunately, Louisa’s part in composing these juvenilia cannot be accurately determined, since Anna, as a teenager, wrote too.

Lit scholars can pick apart the verbiage to declare which words might be Louisa. Little thespians will just enjoy performing them:

RIENZI: ‘Tis a wild and lonely spot, and ‘t is said strange spirits have been seen to wander here. Why come they not? ‘T is past the hour, and I who stand undaunted when the fiercest battle rages round me, now tremble with strange fear in this dim spot. Shame on thee, Rienziu, there is nought to fear.
[Opens a scroll and reads.]
Here are their names, all pledged to see the deed accomplished. ‘T is a goodly list and Constantine must fall when foes like these are round him.
[Ione appears within the glen.]
Ha! Methought I heard a sound! Nay, ‘t was my foolish fancy. Spirits, I defy thee!
IONE: Beware! Beware!
—From The Greek Slave