Yesterday (Thursday), after school, Mer held her second annual Shakespeare Showdown at CVCA. The Showdown involves students acting out short speeches from any of Shakespeare’s plays. They are not allowed to use any costumes or props. This year, Mer had twelve students participating, and had a crowd of about twenty-five people on hand to watch. The winner of the competition goes on to the regional competition in Cleveland in a few weeks.

The sponsors of the program send a judge, and then the school provides two judges, which, in this case, turned out to be me and our friend and colleague Dubbs. The judge from Great Lakes Theater was a very friendly young man who was very enthusiastic about the evening.

The competition was quite good this year. No one “tanked,” although several students needed to be prompted for a line here and there, and several were visibly nervous. They all had reasonable interpretations of the text. In the end, all three of us judges independently came to the conclusion that four of the twelve were the best. We could only have one winner and one runner-up, and we hashed that out quite quickly because once we stated what we thought, we more or less agreed on the placement. The winner of the competition was a young lady who played Lady Macbeth, and the runner-up was a young man who played Shylock. I was pleased for Meredith, though, in that the second annual Shakespeare Showdown was a tremendous success, at least from my perspective, and I’m looking forward to seeing the regional competition.