Thirty-seven plays in 97 minutes: you know it’s going to be wig-flinging, wise-cracking twinkle-toed mayhem. This is the original ‘Abridged Shakespeare’, niftily updated by two of the trio who devised it twenty years ago, Jess Winfield and Daniel Singer. The show is neither aged nor wearied by its success; its imperturbably laid-back West Coast humour still takes the manic edge off the high-speed skits it binds together. The slacker humour starts off a bit too slack (with long fruity prelims from a preeminentshakespearescholar.com guy). But the sheer insouciance of actors John Schwab, Michael O’Connor and Gary Fannin means once the warm-up is done they’re slam-dunking the parodies in with crowd-pleasing ease.
Costumes express the concept: doublet and hose on top, nifty footwork in Converse high-tops below. By the end of the first half they’ve speeded up to doing whole genres in one (the comedies are reduced to ‘Four Weddings and a Transvestite’) thus avoiding the danger that the ‘two-hour traffic’ of their stage could be reduced to a two-hour traffic jam of multiple mini-skits. They high-five their way through a rap ‘Othello’, with the high-fives becoming disgracefully funny in the TV-cookery-show ‘Titus Andronicus’, where chef Titus and his daughter are recent amputees. Their actor-centred spoof is creaky when it leans on the ‘stuff goes wrong’ format but hilarious when it hams up the hammy style of clarifying Shakespeare by miming every flapping crow in the verse. And the ‘Road Trip’ humour of the trio is neatly inserted: ‘But, love’ intones John Schwab’s knuckle-draggingly unwilling Juliet. ‘Buttlove?’ queries her Romeo. Hamlet (played sidelong, forwards and backwards) occupies the second half; Ophelia undrowning is a fittingly slapstick climax for this tirelessly funny and accessible comedy show.
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