Much Ado About Mean Girls author Ian Doescher puts a unique spin on “Jingle Bell Rock,” and he’s here to discuss exactly how he managed to pull it off.
If you’re a fan of Shakespeare and Star Wars, you probably know who Ian Doescher is. He’s been making a name for himself writing the William Shakespeare Star Wars series, which started with Verily, A New Hope and ended with Jedi the Last.
I was a particularly big fan of The Force Doth Awaken.
Now, Doescher is switching gears and tackling a different movie — Mean Girls.
It’s just as strange and intriguing as you might imagine, and a particular highlight is, of course, the infamous talent show sequence. Here’s an exclusive excerpt of just that in all its glory:
When asked about putting together Much Ado About Mean Girls, Ian Doescher says, “Because this is my first time writing an adaptation of a movie surrounding the lives of women, I thought it would be fun to parallel each main female role in Mean Girls with one of Shakespeare’s heroines. After some consideration, Cady Heron became Miranda from The Tempest, Janis Ian is Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing, Regina George is Kate from The Taming of the Shrew, and so on.”
And what about adapting “Jingle Bell Rock?” Doescher says, “The talent show scene was a fun opportunity because Shakespeare included many songs in his plays and I enjoy writing songs for characters as I create my books. The talent show scene has three songs: Kevin Gnapoor’s rap, Damian’s ballad, and the Plastics dancing to ‘Jingle Bell Rock.’ Shakespeare didn’t always stick to his normal meter (iambic pentameter) with his songs, so Damian’s ballad alternates lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, and my rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock” is iambic tetrameter. With ‘Jingle Bell Rock,’ specifically, I always think it’s fun to rewrite classic songs with new lyrics, so there are some familiar lines (‘O jingle horse, lift up thy feet’ = ‘Giddy-up, jingle horse, pick up your feet’) but some unexpected Shakespearean surprises, too: ‘A happy company to meet, / Our feet enjoy a merry beat, / Hey nonny, nonny, ho ho ho!'”
Much Ado About Mean Girls by Ian Doescher is available wherever books are sold! You can purchase a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, and Book Depository, or simply add it to your Goodreads list.
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