PETA's WILLIAM from Shake-fear to Shakes-peer

That was the tagline of this season’s first offering of PETA. PETA has once again provided the local theater scene with world class, original, educational theater production.

“William” is a story of group of high school students trying to grasp who Shakespeare is because of the assignment given to them by their English teacher. Discovering Shakespeare’s works help these students discover their own self and cope up with their personal ordeals. The play culminated with each student doing a monologue from Shakespeare’s play and how it relates to them.

I’m not new to Shakespeare and I’ve seen a lot of productions about his works from Film to theater. But this is the first time I’ve seen a play appreciating most of his work and how one can learn from him. The realization of each character are just perfect with their chosen monologues at the latter part of the play shows how Ron Capinding (the shows playwright) knows so much about Shakespeare. How he manages to create high school students characters learning from Shakespeare’s work was effortless. The issues each student encountered are very common and putting the Shakespeare elements into it makes the play more appealing.

The music and songs played to a younger audience was just great with a hip hop and rap makes it more enjoyable. Lyrics were great and sung clearly by the performers.

I loved the set design! The use of chairs as backgrounds and main set pieces were just ingenious. It makes you feel you’re really in high school. Even the set transitions were great as well. Costumes was something noticeable as well. I loved how they used shirt colors for each student throughout the play, Richard with Red, Erwin with Blue, Estela with Yellow, TJ with Green and Sophia, so pretty in Pink.

Talking to Shakespeare in Hong Kong's Maddame Tussaud's Wax Museum :)

When I watched it last Aug 26, the cast includes Rico Del Rosario as TJ, John Moran as Richard, Inno Martin as Erwin, Anj Heruela as Estella Meann Espinosa as Mrs Martinez and Anna Luna as Sophia. They were just great. Watching them makes you wonder how old… or young they really are. They just slipped into the character and was transformed to these students and will make you reminisce your own high school classmates. The guys John, Rico, and Inno fits perfectly on their roles. Anj and Anna were just great. Anna, I should say was very pretty in her Sophia role but it would be very interesting to see her on Estela’s ‘manang/intelligent’ role (the souvenir program says that she’s doing the two roles). That might be a good reason to see this show again and see how she would attack that role, and not just to see her again, oh did I mention that she was really very pretty.

William will run until Sep 25, 2011 and you can contact PETA for tickets.

Can’t wait for the next show “Haring Lear” next year.