Another Shakespeare play, another Shakespeare puzzle. This time, Rochester Community Players is presenting a really fun version of Pericles, Prince of Tyre for our annual free Shakespeare in the Park. If you’re in the Rochester area between now and Saturday, July 27, you should come see it. If you’re not, you should still do this puzzle.
Thanks to Laura Braunstein, Will Eisenberg and Heather Kennedy for proofreading and test-solving.
Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Rochester Community Players’ latest Shakespeare production, The Winter’s Tale, opens tonight, and, like with all our Shakespeare plays, I’ve constructed a Shakespeare crossword for it. Thanks to Laura Braunstein for helping me brainstorm ideas, and to Kate Hawkins and my dad for test solving.
If you missed it, Laura and I had a puzzle in the Washington Post back in December while regular constructor Evan Birnholz was on paternity leave. You can solve that puzzle here, and also read a little interview with us.
It’s Shakespeare time again! Rochester Community Players’ production of The Merry Wives of Windsor opened last Thursday, and when RCP does Shakespeare, I make a puzzle for it. This one is pretty straight-forward, but the connection between the theme and the play won’t be apparent unless you’re at least a bit familiar with the play – which, let’s face it, even most Shakespeare fans aren’t. Merry Wives isn’t staged that often because it’s not a great play – but this production is great, and anyone in the Rochester area should come by and see it. The show runs until Saturday, July 29, with shows every night except Monday and Tuesday.
Thanks to Matt Gritzmacher, Diane Mezzanotte, BeerandCrosswords, and Stella Zawistowski for test-solving.
Notes (including spoilers)
The Merry Wives of Windsor starts with Falstaff deciding to seduce Mistress Ford and Mistress Page by sending them identical love letters. Of course the two women compare the letters and figure it out immediately:
MISTRESS FORD (after showing her letter to Mistress Page) : Did you ever hear the like?
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II, Scene 1
MISTRESS PAGE: Letter for letter; but that the name of Page and Ford differs!
It’s been a hectic few weeks here, but it’s finally time for another op’nin of another show. This time, Rochester Community Players is presenting Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s greatest comedy about twins who have been separated by a shipwreck and are now constantly being mistaken for each other. The show opens tonight, so if you’re in the Rochester area – and aren’t scared off by the wind and cold – come on by. (Performances continue until Saturday, February 11, just in case you are scared off by the wind and cold.)
Constructing a crossword puzzle for each Shakespeare play seemed like it would be fairly easy when I first came up with the idea, but this one turned out to be a lot harder than I’d expected. I settled on the revealer for this early in the process, but then went through a bunch of failed attempts to fit a theme around it. And once I worked that part out, building a grid around it was another challenge. In the end, the only way to make this work was to include more 3-letter entries than I’d like (the ideal number is as close to zero as possible, because otherwise the puzzle ends up filled with acronyms and foreign words that it’s impossible to write interesting clues for), but I think on the whole I think it worked out well. Thanks to Helen Rosner, Matt Gritzmacher and Evan Jenkins for test-solving.
In non-Shakespeare-related crossword news, Laura and I co-constructed a puzzle for Grids For Kids, a charity pack of puzzles for all ages, created by parents, to benefit children in need. This is a great pack of 25 puzzles (including six kid-friendly ones) by a bunch of awesome constructors (and also me), and you can get them all by donating at little as $10 to a youth-focused not-for-profit of your choice. You can check out a free sample puzzle now, and order the whole package starting this weekend.
Summer in Rochester (as in most cities) means Shakespeare in the Park – in this case, presented by Rochester Community Players. And anytime RCP puts on a Shakespeare show, that means it’s time for me to construct another Shakespeare-themed puzzle. This year’s show is Antony & Cleopatra, which opened on Saturday, and continues until Friday, July 29. If you’re in the Rochester area, please come by and see the show. If you’re not, print out the puzzle, spread out your favorite picnic blanket in a park somewhere, and solve it there. (That doesn’t have anything to do with the puzzle, but at least you’ll get the proper feeling.)
Big thanks to Laura for helping me come up with a theme here and then co-constructing with me.
Another opening, another crossword… Yes, it’s Shakespeare time again (again). Starting tonight, Rochester Community Players will be presenting [57-Across in today’s puzzle]. As always, if you’re anywhere near Rochester this weekend or next weekend, please come by and see it.
As with the summer show, this is a production we were originally supposed to stage last year, but this is also a puzzle I’ve been thinking about for a long time, so I was glad to have an excuse to finally post it. This was another one of those instances where I came up with an idea, thought “how hard could this really be?”, and then found out it was, in fact, really hard to construct. Also, the only way I could make it work was to expand the grid to 19×19, which takes so much longer to fill than a 15×15 grid does. Anyway, I’m please with how it turned out, and I hope you all enjoy it.
It’s Shakespeare time again! Tonight is opening night for Rochester Community Players’s free Shakespeare in the Park production of The Tempest (that’s assuming the actual tempest bearing down on Rochester right now spares us). If you’re anywhere near the Rochester area between now and July 26, please come and see the show. This is a dual-language (English/ASL) production, and each role will be shared between a speaking actor and a signing actor.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this over the last few months as one of the production managers – though not nearly as much time as the cast and crew have spent on it – which is why, even though I came up with this theme last year (we had originally planned to stage this show in 2020, but, you know) I didn’t finish actually constructing the puzzle until this week. You’d think over that time I would have come up with dozens, if not hundreds of potential themers, but it turned out that this theme doesn’t have as any possibilities and I’d imagined. Regardless, I’m still happy with how it turned out.
Since I’m planning to hand a bunch of these out at the show, I tried to keep the clues and fill a little more straightforward than usual. Since I’m still me, I kept some of the nonsense in anyway.
As I’ve mentioned before on here, I’m a big Shakespeare fan, and part of the Rochester Community Players Shakespeare Program. My goal is to create a puzzle for each play we produce, which was easy last year since we weren’t able to do anything. But we’re back now, with a cool video project called Shakespeare in the Time of Covid, featuring five scenes from Shakespeare plays and two from Shakespeare-inspired plays—all reimagined a bit for our current times. I even created one of the scenes, but you’ll have to guess which one (or just look at the credits at the end).
Even better, after over a year off, we’re now gearing up for our free Shakespeare in Highland Park show, which is a dual-cast, dual-language (English/ASL) production of The Tempest, where each role will be played by both a speaking actor and a signing actor. (And, yes, I have a Tempest-themed puzzle in the works.) Staging a show like this is always a lot of work, and doing so while keeping everyone safe this year is even harder. (The fact that it’s an outdoor show in July, when we expect most of the audience will be vaccinated, makes things a little easier, but we will still have a lot of safety precautions in place.) If you’d like to help out, you can donate to RCP. The more money we raise, the less stressful our production meetings are, and the more time I have to construct new puzzles for here, so everybody wins!
Anyway, this puzzle doesn’t have much to do with the video project, but it is about Shakespeare adaptations. If you’re not familiar with any of them, 17A is a hilarious web comic that’s also one of the best ways to learn about Shakespeare; 31A is one of the best musicals ever made; 38A is an amazingly weird experience that I hope will be able to resume one day; 58A is really fun TV series (though some of the subplots in the second and third seasons are a little weak); and 47A is a kind of meh novella that I used because nothing else fit the theme. Also, there are at least three entries in the fill that are almost always clued with reference to Shakespeare, but which I clued differently. See if you can find them!
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Nate Cardin and Rachel Fabi assembled a great “virtual table” of free puzzles for this year’s ACPT, and they’re a great way to learn about lots of new constructors. (This puzzle is included in that collection, in case you like it so much you want to solve it twice.) You can also solve this year’s tournament puzzles, which aren’t free, but which were all really good.
Crazy at it may seem, I do have interests outside of crossword puzzles, and one of those interests is the works of William Shakespeare (you may have heard of him). Somehow, this interest has led me to become part of the Rochester Community Players Shakespeare Program, even though I’m not at all a theater person. My acting career – such as it was – peaked when I played Max in my fifth grade class’s production of The Sound of Music, which is about as far as one can go with no actual talent other than an ability to remember one’s lines. (As befits a fifth-grade production, this version of Max was a lot less of a Nazi collaborator than the Max of the original musical/movie.)
Our production of Comedy of Errors opens tonight, so I thought I’d construct a twinlet puzzle to go with it. For those who are unfamiliar with the format, a twinlet puzzle is two identical grids with the clues all mixed together. For those who are unfamiliar with Comedy of Errors, it’s Shakespeare’s second greatest comedy about twins who have been separated by a shipwreck and are now constantly being mistaken for each other – and you might want to take a quick look at the names of the characters, since that will make the puzzle a lot easier. And if you’re in the Rochester area, please come to the show.
Finally, since there’s no way to solve a twinlet puzzle on a computer, this puzzle is only available as a PDF.
