College stab at play wins ovation

Take William Shakespeare's Hamlet and add a little Italian mafia to the mix: what do you get?
A duel, a poison cup, a fight with knives. Nine Tauranga Boys' College students have for the past few months been focusing on an adaptation of one of Shakespeare's greats.
The Year 11 boys' dedication won them the prestigious Sheila Winn competition - a regional battle for the best Shakespearian performance.
Now they will be polishing their performance for the National Festival in Wellington at Queen's Birthday weekend. Tauranga Boys' drama teacher and play director Kimberley Fridd adapted the main characters of Hamlet to fit a mafia theme, topped off with an Italian restaurant setting. Andre Harris and Zach Challies - two of the play's main actors - reckon getting to act as "wiseguys" makes it all the more enjoyable.
They said establishing a thick mafia accent was one of the biggest challenges of the scene. They practised for two hours after school twice a week from the beginning of the year.
By watching the television show The Sopranos, Zach and Andre were able to perfect their "wiseguy" accents. "Trying to perfect the accent was quite hard," Zach said but his example showed he had it down pat.
Two students opened the scene singing Frank Sinatra's It Was a Very Good Year with the stage drenched in blood-red lighting. Actors wowed judges with their passionate performances which, by the end of the scene, saw them sprawled across the stage dead.
The regional competition was held at Mount Maunganui College last week and featured about 16 performances from Western Bay colleges.
There were two sections for entrants: A 15-minute scene directed by a teacher or a five-minute scene directed by a student. Bethlehem College took first place for the student-directed scene.
From their performance in the national competition, the Tauranga college boys could be chosen to participate in an intensive drama workshop in Palmerston North - and possibly a trip to the Globe Theatre, where Hamlet was first performed more than 400 years ago.