Will Holcomb

My son and I wrote Shakespeare Rocks for the Bastrop Opera House youth troupe to take to the Texas Non-profit Theater youth festival in Odessa Texas in 2013. It was a huge hit. What was great about the show is it gave small doses of Shakespeare broken up with a modern story about a kid having to write a report on Shakespeare. Another interesting aspect is the mixing of video with live theater and had the cast interacting with the video. The youth troupe loved performing the show and the audience loved watching it.

I have thought over and over about offering the play to schools or other youth troupes but, as with technology, the videos got lost. I have the script but one of the things that made the show interesting was the interaction with the video. Over the last couple of years I have tried to find the vidoes and had the person who filmed them try to find his versions. But they were missing.

Today we booted up an old laptop for a completely different reason and there they were! I have the videos! I now have them saved in multiple places and even loaded some of them on YouTube. I will be modifying the script for distribution.

This is the raw footage of the show in Odessa. Watch this first, at least the first few minutes, before you watch the individual videos. Watching the individual videos don’t make sense without the actors on stage. But I posted video number one and video number two because the raw footage only shows a small screen on stage. After people understand what is happening on stage, they will understand the individual videos.

This is a great show to introduce kids to Shakespeare. If you are interested in producing the the show, contact me because I am interesting in getting kids interested in Shakespeare.