By Monique Danziger
William Shakespeare once wrote that brevity is the soul of wit. Condensing his entire catalog of work — some 37 plays — into 97 minutes may not have been what he had in mind.
However, the Bard of Avon also harbored a love of irony, a taste for the absurd and a flair for the dramatic, so perhaps this madcap condensation of his work would have been right up his alley. There’s also a heavy dose of improv and audience participation, a further homage to the original production of his plays, which were performed to packed houses and rowdy English crowds.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [Revised], now running at Cottage Theatre, manages to depart from the stuffiness and pomp of the Shakespearean canon while remaining true to the source material. It is a show within a show, and beneath the jokes lies an enduring reverence for the man often touted as the world’s greatest poet.
The show’s cast, the fabulous trio of Chelsey Megli, Blake Nelson and Kory Weimer, shows infectious delight and seemingly limitless energy running, riffing, soliloquizing and dancing their way through all 37 tragedies, histories, comedies – and yes, even the sonnets.
There are also a lot of costume changes, visual gags and wigs. A lot of wigs.
Megli leads the group as the most serious. She opens the show by greeting the audience with The Collected Works of Shakespeare in her arms before running through some calculations about just how much Shakespeare per minute will need to be consumed in order to get through the 6-pound tome in an hour and a half.
Nelson is a self-described preeminent Shakespearean scholar, which we learn is not the same as being an eminent Shakespearean scholar, and Weimer’s knowledge is based on what he’s skimmed from Wikipedia.
Still, the trio is determined to give the Bard his due. Starting with Romeo and Juliet, set not in fair Verona but in America’s Old West, Montague and Capulet saunter past each other, both doing their best Clint Eastwood in a Fistful of Dollars. From there the audience is treated to Titus Andronicus, reimagined as a cooking show called The Gory Gourmet and a dizzying distillation of every comedy combined into one very zany episode of Lost.
Some of the best moments in the show come when the trio bring to life Shakespeare’s smallest characters — the witch at the opening of Macbeth or the thumb-biting, rabble-rousing Sampson, Gregory and Abram from Romeo and Juliet. There is also no end to the fun of watching Weimer don a wig and run about screaming. From Juliet to Ophelia, he is a whirlwind in Farrah Fawcett curls.
After covering an impressive amount of content in the first half, the show’s second half focuses on Hamlet. It is not without trepidation that they do so. Hamlet, arguably one of if not the best of Shakespeare’s plays, is not the kind of thing that can be rushed. Or done at double speed. Or done backwards. Or is it? As an aside, the trio manage to fix one glaring error in the play, which is the underwriting of the character of Ophelia. They actually do justice to her complexity and torment, with a little help from the audience.
This is a very physical and fast-paced show that demands stamina, quick thinking, and impeccable timing. Megli, Nelson, and Weimer make it look easy. And while they run through countless characters, they infuse each one with their own personality, to great effect. There are prop jokes and plays on words and quite a bit of scatological humor, but the biggest laughs come from watching the three actors make their journey through the Shakespearean landscape.
Director Rachel E.F. Froom does a phenomenal job of orchestrating chaos. That the show unfolds as smoothly as it does is a credit to the hard work of the actors and Froom’s direction. It is also worth calling out the excellent curation of props by prop manager Glenda Koyama and stage manager Bil Morril for a great late-in-the-show cameo.
At one point in the show, Nelson advises the audience, “There’s a lot of crazy props flying around, a lot of sharp swords. It may look like fun and games, but really, this is very difficult and dangerous. Please, keep in mind that we are trained professionals. Don’t try this at home.”
But the cast make it look so fun, it does inspire another look at the Shakespeare’s work with a fresh pair of eyes. All one needs is an open mind, a few friends and a good sense of humor. A few wigs — and your very own mechanical shark (for the part when you yell out “But I’m Sharkespeare”) — might also be helpful.
