These days, the Broadway stage is rife with big names. Kathleen Turner took a turn as Mrs. Robinson (as in “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me”), and Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane spent time on the stage as Producers before starring in the film of the same name, but after becoming big-screen stars in their own right. And, of course, Lindsay Lohan did some live “acting” at the Tail Chase Club.

Oh, wait. That’s not what I was supposed to highlight. Regardless, you get the idea. Heck, Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, has been in a bunch of musicals, and they ain’t been about hairy dudes with claws cutting up bad guys.

Live! On stage! That’s what you could say ’round these parts about all the sassy actors that have graced the stage either on Broadway or off-Broadway. Or off-off-Broadway. Or even in Poughkeepsie.

But what of the future? Likely, we’ll see musical cavalcades of has-beens and never-wases parading across the stage like a cabaret of Betty Ford Clinic rejects. It’ll be grand! Can’t you just picture Brigitte Nielsen and Chris Tucker doing a duet with a kick line behind them?

Unfortunately, these days, old actors don’t die, they don’t fade away, and most of them don’t go to Broadway. They wind up doing reality TV shows, usually to find true love, but sometimes we just get to follow them around and count how many movements they have in a day. Hooray for us.

I think that, once you see an episode of a show where a celebrity doesn’t wash his or her hands after going to the bathroom, hearing about a sex scandal with that person isn’t as big a deal. The threshold between “untouchable Hollywood personality” and “that guy next door that used to be something big” has been crossed. There are exceptions, but this kind of reality TV does nothing to make the world a better place.

But since we’re talking about mixing elements of Stage and Screen, there is a large pool of work that has gone from the stage to the screen in many different manners, and I think it’s time it went back. I’m talking about Shakespeare, my good man. Shakespeare.

The easiest thing to do would be to come up with a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost. It ends on something of a cliffhanger, with major characters saying they’ll meet each other again in a year. Ol’ Billy Shakes never published a follow-up to see what happened to those folks and their “twelve months plus one day” plans. Well, Love’s Labour’s Found would be the sequel to that Shakespearean work featuring four lads and four lasses.

But why stop there? We’re talking about bringing more Hollywood to the stage; by combining Shakespeare and zombies, we can come up with quite plausible sequels to the greatest works of the English language. In the tragedies especially, we see death and disaster abound. Imagine Zombie Julius Caesar coming back to fight Augustus for the right to rule Rome. And Othello and Desdemona can finally get that happy ending they both really do deserve.

Hamlet’s last act, which features the deaths of (I hope I’m not spoiling anything for anyone here; if I am, go read a play, for the sake of zombie chocolate!) Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself, would be a perfect jumping-off point for the sequel to begin. (Yes, I know there’s already a movie called Hamlet 2, but I’m talking about a true stage follow-up.)

Fortinbras, the foreign king, comes in and sees the carnage, but he knows what’s up. He wants to burn the bodies before they rise up again all corpsified. The other Danes stop him, and while he’s trying to convince them that his actions are the right ones, Hamlet and the rest of the royal family pop up out of death and start trying to eat brains. I’m sure the critics would love it!

You wouldn’t have to stop with Shakespeare. Other plays would make sense: The Undeath of a Salesman, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Zombie of Fleet Street, Cats.

So, my point is, our favorite entertainment mediums need not live mutually exclusively. And beware zombies. The only thing scarier than a zombie attack is a Velociraptor attack. Or a world without Alyssa Milano.

Go see a movie.