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Sally receives Best Director & Best Ensemble Cast Awards at New Zealand WebFest for Shakespeare Republic
The end of 2021 was an absolute whirlwind of activity, and it only got busier with a new acting gig and a separate new directing gig in the first three months of 2022, which means I’m only just catching up on updating this news section! There is a lot to get through, so there will be a flurry of posts over the next few weeks – fair warning! I have to start the good news sharing with this amazing thing that happened in November over in New Zealand. In a night of amazing outcomes, I was so thrilled to be able to accept the awards for Best Ensemble Cast (International…
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Sally wins Creator Amets at Seriesland in Spain!
It has been a CRAZY time over the past 19 months. Despite my home town of Melbourne spending over 260 days in lockdown, which just ended, I somehow managed to be in more productions as an actor than I had been in the 2 years previous to 2020, performing exclusively Shakespeare in six productions – five of them based in the UK. And, because I can’t sit still, as I’ve written about before on this blog, I also created a new season of my web series, Shakespeare Republic – filming with 23 other actors (I was the 24th) based in seven different cities on three different continents – all working…
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Shakespeare Republic Season Three screening at SeriesFest
It has been a wonderful week of virtually attending SeriesFest in the USA, where my digital series Shakespeare Republic is screening at the moment as an Official Selection. As much as the pandemic has wreaked havoc, there have been some silver linings in respect to opening up the ability to virtually attend these events for those of us based outside of the UK and US, who might not usually be able to take part. Despite the VERY early mornings (most workshops have been taking place at 3am Melbourne time), I have found myself leaping out of bed to get onto the video conferencing calls, anxious that I don’t miss any…
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Sally wins Best Actress award at UVFF 2021
During 2020 I got used to being up early to perform Shakespeare, working with the fab The Show Must Go Online, who are based in the UK. So being up early to participate in a UK-based project was not a new thing for me. What was new, was the outcome of being up that early for that reason. Last Monday morning (at 3am Melbourne time), I had the great pleasure of being part of the UVFF Awards on the last night of the festival, which normally takes place in venues around Islington in London (in a normal, non-COVID world). This year, it was a virtual event attended by over 70…
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Sally nominated for Best Actress & Best Director at the 2021 UVFF Awards in the UK
Last year was a really challenging year for all of us. And I added to this by deciding to create and direct a new season of Shakespeare Republic, set and filmed entirely in lockdown. It was the most wonderful, crazy, sometimes difficult but absolutely rewarding experience I could have had. The creative family that formed around the new season, made up of existing Republic ensemble joined by a whole new swathe of actors and regular Republic crew, creating a total of 24 episodes, was one of the best things about 2020 for me. It was an absolute privilege to work with these extraordinary actors, based in Melbourne, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh,…
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Sally nominated for “Outstanding Performance in a Principal Role” for the Show that keeps on giving
Last year was, let’s be blunt, awful for the Performing Arts industries worldwide in so many ways. Theatres, film and TV sets, cinemas, anything that required human contact, closed. So many of us were suddenly left without any work and, in many cases, also went into hard lockdowns to try and stem the spread of the virus. But last year also brought about some amazing things. The Arts can often mean Innovation. And artists around the world began to clearly show that correlation in full. One such example (pretty much the first during the pandemic), created something that has now become an institution, and, I believe, holds an important place…
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New season of Shakespeare Republic screening at eleven international film festivals!
It’s been a while since an update, for which I apologise, but this post will go a long way towards explaining my absence from this blog! At the start of the current pandemic, I was toying with the idea of doing a stand-alone season of Shakespeare Republic. All my other projects had to go on hold and I had no idea what I was going to do with all that free time. I could have learned to bake, and there were times this year where I thought maybe I should have, but as I am now heading into the final strait of directing and producing this latest season, I have…
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Live theatre in the age of COVID-19 – The Show Must Go Online
When I got the email about ten days ago that I’d been cast in the new online initiative, The Show Must Go Online, as “Katherina” (or “Kate” as I call her) in The Taming Of The Shrew, I’ll admit to an initial hesitation at saying yes. Not because I didn’t want to play her – I’d submitted to do the show in the first place, and I’ve been fascinated by “Kate” from the first time I saw her (as a Hollywood musical obsessed kid) portrayed by Kathryn Grayson in a late night TV re-run of the movie Kiss Me Kate when I was about 10 years old. Admittedly, that early…
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Shorts Relief is nigh, This Wooden O and Chasing Pegasus is done and Dark Arcadia looms
Its been a VERY busy time since the end of last year, so this update is covering three projects that I’ve been involved in – one of which is happening this weekend in Melbourne and is going to be absolutely huge – Shorts Relief: Flicks For the Fires takes place at The Capitol Theatre, Swanston Street, Melbourne this Sunday March 8 and as Event Producer, I’m deep in the trenches for final prep for that, but more about that in a moment! Let’s do a quick round up of what’s been happening since I last posted here first … Chasing Pegasus (a play in ten chords) On December 11th I…
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“Preacher”, “Playing The Bard” update, festival and panel appearances and more …
As a friend said in an email to me earlier this week – “Where has the year gone!?”. November already! So much to share, so here goes … It’s been a big few months on the work front since August. I taught another round of Playing The Bard: Shakespeare in Performance at the fabulous Howard Fine Acting Studio, as well as spending three wonderful weeks with the Howard Fine Full Time ensemble in Melbourne, again teaching them Shakespeare, with some truly beautiful work being produced by the 30+ actors it has been my privilege to teach this work to over the past nine weeks. On the acting front, I had…
Sally McLean: Actor. Writer. With a bit of a thing for Shakespeare.
