Jeana's Family Blog: The Taming of the Shrew

It's no surprise that I love Shakespeare. For goodness sake, my girls have all been named after a character from one of his plays. My girls know which play is theirs. So when Bianca's teacher announced their sixth-grade play would be Taming of the Shrew, Bianca had only one goal: to get the part of Bianca, her namesake. She worked really hard and auditioned, and got the part!

As a class, they were working on this for over two months. At last, on the day of the performance, we got to see Bianca on stage being Bianca. Some of the school classes came to see the performance, and the parents too, of course.

The part really was made for her. In fact, one of her first lines is: "My books and instruments shall be my company." If that doesn't describe my daughter, I don't know what else does.

The production was quite good, and I think Bianca's a better actor than I realized.

In character

We had to provide our own costume and I thought Bianca's Jottum Rembrandt dress worked great, although it could have been longer as most dresses were ankle length in Renaissance times.

There are a ton of girls in Bianca's class so some of the girls had to take on the boy parts (funny how in Shakespeare's time, it was the boys dressing up as the girl characters).

Bianca got to know a lot of the kids really well from working together on this project. It was a lot of work--they made their own sets (see photo above), did their own costuming and make-up, wrote some of the scenes, and then of course memorized all the lines and actions. Bianca had a hand in the music production as well. And we all know old English isn't exactly the easiest to understand and they were great.

The video footage we got isn't spectacular. In fact, you have to listen really hard to hear what they're saying as we were sitting against the back wall and using Eric's phone for this scene. But here is a scene of Hortensio (played by Morgan) and Lucentio (played by Garrett) both trying to win Bianca:

It's sad to see Bianca's last year in elementary school come to an end. Our experience at Westfield has been great and I don't doubt our move now, at all. Here are a couple pictures of some of the kids who worked so hard on this production.