ARTIST TALK: JOE STATON

An interview by Russell Legaspi, April 27, 2021

Joe Staton, actor, founder and Artistic Director of The Blind Cupid Shakespeare Company, talks about their current project: an audio drama series of Tales From Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, in collaboration with Quarantine Kids Storytime. Blind Cupid is currently raising money to bring professional Shakespeare productions to the Costa Blanca in Spain. You can donate to their cause here: https://tinyurl.com/talesfromshakespeare

1. How did this project come to be?

After the success of our last production, All’s Well As It End’s Well: A Virtual Valentine’s Project, I was eager to try something new. The Blind Cupid team had grown with the addition of two new members (Frances Knight, our amazing Social Media Manager and Elize Layton who is now in charge of Project Development and is really rocking that role) and I didn’t want to just repeat the same thing we had done before without stretching our skills a little. On the sidelines, I run a Facebook group in which writers can get their work read out loud by actors and receive feedback for their scripts and during one such event, I met Sascha Cooper; an actress, director and life coach based in Brighton, here in the UK. Sascha mentioned to me that she ran an audiobook project called Quarantine Kids Storytime, which employed actors to create audio recordings of short stories. Seeing an opportunity, I invited Sascha to meet with myself and Alice Lussiana Parente, who is on our board as an Executive Producer and is an incredibly talented actress with a great deal of experience in recording audio books. We had a very productive meeting in which Sascha pitched us the idea of producing the series Tales From Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb and we just thought it was really exciting and different!

2. What appealed to you about Tales From Shakespeare?

Sascha was the one who pitched them to us, I had never heard of Charles and Mary Lamb before. They were siblings who were both well respected writers and very prominent in the literary world. They wrote Tales From Shakespeare in 1807, and the book is basically 20 of Shakespeare’s plays, written as narratives. As Blind Cupid aims to reach out to International schools in the Costa Blanca, and wherever else our work takes us, I liked the idea of having a project behind us that told the stories of Shakespeare’s plays in a more simplified fashion. Also, as we can’t all be together right now because of a certain pandemic I keep hearing about, this was a cool project to work on that could be done fully remotely.

3. What challenges did you and the team come across when executing this project?

When Charles and Mary Lamb wrote Tales From Shakespeare, they said that the book would be “intended for the use of young persons”. I don’t know if children in 1807 London were more advanced than nowadays but these short stories definitely needed a bit of editing in order to be understood! There were also a couple of things that we decided to exclude from the final drafts because, unfortunately, there were a couple of things in there that wouldn’t sit well with a modern day audience (Such as a few, shall we say, outdated lines in Taming of the Shrew). Otherwise, the project is going smoothly so far! Everyone in the team is working incredibly hard, from both sides!

4. Which play adaptation are you reading and how did you divide the plays?

So, as there are 20 plays, both Blind Cupid and Quarantine Kids are reading 10 each. We reached an agreement mutually as to which ones we would be doing. Blind Cupid is doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, King Lear, Winter’s Tale and Two Gentlemen of Verona. R&J and Winter’s Tale have already been released and King Lear shall be released this coming Sunday. Quarantine Kids have released Macbether and All’s Well That Ends Well and their next one, Cymbeline, will be this Saturday. Every weekend shall see the release of a new one. We didn’t audition anyone for this but instead wanted to divide the plays among the team and with actors we have worked with in the past. My only condition was that I wanted there to be a Spanish actor involved, in order to relate the project to our goal of producing a show in Spain. Thankfully Marc DiFrancisco, a Madrid based actor, accepted our offer to record Hamlet. 

I chose to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream because that was the first Shakespeare I ever read and was also the first professional Shakespeare play I was cast in, with the Classic Theatre of San Antonio in Texas. This recording was so much fun to do: the characters are so animated and I got to do different voices for them, I loved it!

5. Any more shoutouts you’d like to make?

JT Stocks, who is our Managing Director, has been essential in making Blind Cupid work and his recent recording of Winter’s Tale was wonderful. He is a fantastic director and a great guy to work with. He’s about to start running the Blind Cupid Shakespeare podcast which will be released soon!

Also, Jack Chandler at Quarantine Kids has been doing all the editing and he’s doing a marvelous job; he’s very skilled at helping us all sound good! Also, my dear friend Alex Kireev has been doing all the artwork and graphic design and his skill is a rare find! I highly recommend following him on instagram (@sketchesfrommoscow) and hiring him to do concept art for any shows you do! He’s such a talented man!

6. Are you or will you be working on anything else?

There are a few other projects that I personally have coming up with other companies, which I shall announce when they do! It may be too soon to say right now! As for Blind Cupid, we are in the process of collaborating with a theatre company in Marrakech called MODS (Marrakech Operatic and Dramatic Society) to produce another online showcase, and hopefully we’ll be heading over there at some point! Right now the pandemic makes decisions extremely hard to make, however this does not mean we will not continue to produce content, contacts and plans! We believe strongly in our mission and are extremely proud of the international collaborations that we are continuing to successfully build and expand! Be sure to keep an eye out!