Comparing Shakespeare's Poetry to a Musical

JOE CALARCO: Things have gotten very casual. The whole idea is that it's supposed to sound natural, but when you really look at great Shakespearean actors, they don't really try to make it sound natural. Acting styles change throughout the ages, so I'm not talking about this huge intoning of the sounds of the speech, but to try to pretend like it's verse. It's poetry and that's not the way we speak. To me, I compare it to a musical. People sing when their emotions can't contain regular speech.

That was a great image for me to think about, was that, the idea that in the musical, when you are feeling so much, you have to sing. In Shakespeare, they're feeling so much that they have to speak in poetry and it either goes into verse or it's all in verse. That tells you the stakes of what's going on and how much they're feeling, that they are speaking in poetry. And in something like Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is a poet and they are both so in love that they are constantly trying to find words big enough to describe their love, which at some times becomes almost comic because they go on and give you twelve examples of how much, of why they love each other, or how much they love each other.

So, that just made sense to me, in the sense of emotionally, of how to tell someone that you better figure out why it means so much for this character to have to say these words, and why they are searching for such imagery. The words are painting, at times, incredibly vivid images, so that to me just makes sense in how to speak to actors. It's all there, it makes sense.