Is there a (North-)West Coast Shakespeare?

2018-10-18

Issue 2 (2017) has just been published on our new OJS platform. This issue — featuring reviews of productions by Vancouver's Bard on the Beach, Vancouver Opera, Langara College, York Theatre in East Vancouver, Portland's Original Practice Shakespeare Festival, and the Seattle Shakespeare Company — asks "Is there a (North-)West Coast Shakespeare?" (see Editorial by Kevin Quarmby and Melissa Walter). We hope this issue will be the first of many that shine a light on a particular region.

In addition, the issue includes our first film review (Anna Kurian's review of The Hungry) and our first book review (Scene Editor Kevin Quarmby's review of David Lawrence's history of the Wellington Summer Shakespeare). 

With this issue, Scene moves from its first home on the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) site into an Open Journal Systems platform hosted at the University of Victoria. Our move to OJS delayed the production of the issue, but the benefits to our contributors and readers are considerable: a robust, secure digital home on a widely used platform; downloadable PDFs; Digital Object Identifiers for each review; and indexing services.

With our independence from the ISE, we are able to expand Scene's remit. We welcome reviews of all early modern drama (including Shakespeare) and adaptations thereof. Our focus continues to be regional productions that might not otherwise be reviewed by academic viewers. Our new mission states that "Scene publishes review essays about early modern English drama in performance, reviews of productions and adaptations of early modern plays, book reviews, and production notes. Our scope is mainstream professional productions, as well as university, drama school, and non-professional productions."

Contributors to this issue are Megan Elizabeth Allen, Ronda Arab, Paul Budra, Virginia Cooke, Sean Henry, Erin Kelly, Jamie Paris, Prabhjot Parmar, Eve Preus, Elizabeth Tavares, Melissa Walter, and Kevin Quarmby.