Poll: Shakespearean fun?

I was just talking about how much fun A Midsummer Night's Dream is with one of my colleagues. He was watching a DVD of the favorite production of both of us. The British TV version from 1968 with Diana Rigg, David Warner, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, and Ian Holm.

That is my favorite recorded production. The best live production was the Gorilla Rep's! . They performed it in Washington Square Park. They did not use a stage and there were no seats. It is what they call Environmental Theatre. They used the park as their stage and when the scene changed they'd move to a different part of the park and the audience followed them. There were no sets, not much in the way of costumes, just great acting and directing and lots of laughs.

Yea to the plays, nay to the sonnets.

A guy in my office went a real long way to make a real bad Shakespeare joke yesterday...

"Man, with Hurricane Ophelia's meandering path and all the uncertainty in where it will go, shouldn't we rename it Hurricane Hamlet"?

Bwahaha.
I've been enjoying the irony of being flooded by a storm named Ophelia...but even I didn't take the literary geekiness THAT far!

Anyone else have any favorite productions of Shakespeare?

Anyone else like Mel Gibson's Hamlet?

How about Kenneth Brannagh's?

Orson Welles's MacBeth?

I loved Looking for Richard and Branagh's Much Ado I also so a great production of Much Ado on broadway with Derek Jakobi.

The New York Shakespeare Company did so many great and awful versions of Shakespeare. Some tried way too hard to be different and failed. Kevin Kline was always great in anything.

There is a revival on B'way now of the first NYSC production I saw, the musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. That tried hard to be different but in that case it worked.

Love Brannagh's Much Ado About Nothing and Love's Labours Lost.

And LOVED the live production of Macbeth that I worked on at Midd freshman year.