"It is I, Hamlet, the cheese Danish."
Bard-a-bump! (If you'll pardon the Renaissance rim shot by way of the Catskills.)
Good evening, thy ladies and germs, and welcome to Borscht-Belt Shakespeare, a.k.a., The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged).
And thy humblest condolences.
Despite enough energy expended by the cast to warrant a Nevada Power bill, this frenetic hodgepodge comes off like a clumsy frat house talent show. Nothing discomforts quite like comedy-free comedy: sweaty, overworked shtick reaping an awkward silence from an audience, strewn with mercy giggles.
Slyly echoing the subversive glee of Rocky & Bullwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales, this sketch show skewering all of the Great Shakes' 37 plays in a two-hour smorgasbord—a rap Othello, gory Titus Andronicus as a cooking show, Romeo & Juliet performed by two men, Hamlet by way of the Three Stooges—was written and originally performed in Gotham by the three-actor Reduced Shakespeare Co.
In Summerlin, Shawn Hackler, Jennifer Tidwell and Jonathan Maimes of Stage Door Entertainment bust their Shakespearean/vaudevillian rumps to jump-start the show's pulse, but it's like propping up a corpse. Their efforts are euthanized by Terrence R. Williams' DOA direction. Williams mistakes broad comedy for braying foolishness and reduces his actors to buffoons, forgetting that the best buffoonery is precision-choreographed.
"This is for those who don't know Shakespeare from shinola!" Tidwell fairly thunders during the introduction, setting the decibel level of the performance just shy of "stun."
"Shakespeare has been shrunken by sitcoms! Sodomized by soap operas! Annihilated by Andrew Lloyd Webber! ... Let's have a world where men are proud to wear pink tights!"
Still, quicksilver moments of hilarity streak through, hinting of this speedy satire's zany zeal when handled with more finesse:
"Hey!" a drag-queen Juliet says to a frisky Romeo, "second base is for second dates, OK, sweetie?" As her (OK, his) death scene commences, Juliet complains of cramps and "that not-so-fresh feeling." And it's tough not to grin at an R&J in which warring Capulets and Montagues don Yankee and Red Sox caps.
But friends, readers, playgoers, lend us your ears so we may tell of the many ways to bury Shakespeare and to praise him ... squandered:
All the history plays (various Henrys, Richards and John) smushed into a slo-mo football game, the pigskin replaced by the crown of England. All 17 comedies (Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, etc.) colliding in The Love Boat Goes to Verona. All the tragedies (Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, yadda-yadda) turned upside down, including a condensed Hamlet performed backward, that also puts Ophelia through therapy, analyzing her id, ego and superego with audience assistance.
Rappin' Othello may be the pithiest piece—and most comedically disciplined—the noble Moor's tale of doomed love with Desdemona hip-hoppin' with references to The Beverly Hillbillies theme and Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music, White Boy."
Yes, it's clever stuff—satiric enough to tickle Bard-o-philes, silly enough to entertain the un-enraptured. The cast aims for Carol Burnett Show camaraderie—Jenn is our brazen Carol, Shawn and Jonathan our Tim and Harvey—but the execution looks sloppy and feels under-rehearsed.
Clad in pantaloons, pink tights and sneakers, the trio appropriately look the fools, but much of the sharp wit feels stomped upon as the actors stomp around, occasionally looking lost, seemingly more interested in merely running their lines than milking them. You sense this would read funnier than it plays.
An index card passed among the audience containing Shakespeare's "sonnets" is a gag out of gas; the show limps into intermission with one of the actors "abandoned" on stage by the other two (evidently, to amuse us); and sprints into the crowd with the house lights up to kibitz, cajole and (yes) fake-vomit on the audience are cloddish. And cringe-worthy.
Borscht-Belt Bard? I'll stick with the golden oldies: Take thy wife ... please.