Another School Walkout?

Walking out on Shylock seems an even more incendiary scenario than the Mike Daisey fracas!

Ah, but wait. This one has a happy ending...

A couple of months ago, the sixth graders at Middle School 443 in Park Slope were prematurely ushered out of a production of “The Merchant of Venice” at the Duke Theater on West 42nd Street because of bad weather and scheduling problems with the cheese buses — so called, a student named Taneice Williams explained, because “they’re yellow, and they smell.”

When word of their disappointment got back to the show’s star, F. Murray Abraham, he decided, with the encouragement of the show’s producers, the Theater for a New Audience, to do the next best thing, and take Shylock’s infamous courtroom scene to their school.

Read on for a nice theatre related human interest story, courtesy of NYTimes Sunday "City" section.

In Full Metal Jacket, you may remember the "Stars and Stripes" editor instructs his reporters to always tag on a "weenie" at the end of their stories--like soldiers giving kids chocolate, or better, scoring a kill. The weeine here? F. Murray's Oscar.