Bard heroines in mash-up at Butterfly Club

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Resource Text: Review
Title Bard heroines in mash-up at Butterfly Club
Creator Contributors
Abstract/Description Even Shakespeare leaves us wanting when it comes to serious roles for women. We get Cleopatra, of course, but most of his female characters, original as they are, all have something opaque about them, a sort of limit that the Bard was only able to transcend in the greatest of his male creations. Carla Kissane's Whores and Weeping Women is in part a celebration of the power and variety of Shakespeare's heroines, but also an irreverent caricature of this limit. The idea is a simple one - almost crassly naive - but also kind of brilliant: a cabaret combining Shakespeare's text with contemporary pop music. Accompanied by Andrew Patterson on piano, Kissane sets the tone with a very punchy mash-up of Kate's defence of wifely submission in The Taming of the Shrew and Eminem's ode to connubial bliss Love the Way You Lie. Other pairings include Isabella from Measure for Measure with Miley Cyrus, and Ophelia with Florence and the Machine. It's all very rough and humble and doesn't always flow seamlessly, but Kissane is an experienced Shakespearean whose confidence with the text elevates this above mere post-postmodern farce.
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Source The Age, Francis Cooke, South Melbourne, Vic, 1854
Page 33
Date Issued 22 November 2013
Language English
Citation Andrew Fuhrmann, Bard heroines in mash-up at Butterfly Club, The Age, 22 November 2013, 33
Data Set AusStage
Resource Identifier 78047