A Shakespearean Face Off

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And by that I mean the SyFy Channel's reality show, Face Off. The latest episode (season 9, episode 7) is a Shakespeare challenge!  Apparently (I can't find the full episode online yet), the task is to make up male mannequins like female characters from Shakespeare.

Here's a sneak peek of the episode, and I'm excited that the first character we hear about is Sycorax.  Not Juliet, not Cleopatra...Sycorax. A character that most audiences won't even recognize, and for the record never actually appears in the play :).  What's interesting to me is that the contestant even describes her as ugly.  Given that she's pregnant when she arrives on the island, I always thought that at least in her younger years, she could have been quite the looker.  Prospero even describes her as having blue eyes, even after all those years.  Must have been memorable for him!

UPDATE: The show aired, so check out the recap. Some fascinating stuff here, like how one guy got Hippolyta and somebody else got Titania (will they end up looking at all similar?)  Or how somebody else gets Queen Mab, another character that technically doesn't show up in the play!  And let's not skip over the pregnant Hermione.  For 16 years? Really?

Pictures of Queen Mab and Ophelia included, and it's easy to see why the Ophelia guy goes home. She looks more like zombie Gertrude, at best.

The full episode is not yet online, but I'll try to update this post when I find it.