If you like silly shows, done fast and with gusto, and if you feel so-so about Shakespeare, you are going to like what FST does with its revival of 36 truncated plays of Shakespeare, skewered. As a reviewer, I noted an enthusiastic audience among those who admitted not having read or seen some of the more obscure plays. Many reveled in several episodes of audience participation. With the latter, I wondered if I'd been time-warped into last summer's held-over Patsy Cline memento where onlookers were grabbed for a dance or solicited for yuk yuk yuks.
Here's what fans laughed at: a "Romeo and Juliet" with Christopher Patrick Mullen as Darth Vader as Tibalt; a Friar whose vial is full of Johnny Walker; overweight Michael Daly as Romeo and overweight Brad DePlanche as a long-braided Juliet, not on a balcony but spilling over a wall as if awaiting Rumplestiltskin. There's a "Titus Andronicus" Cooking School skit, held over from the first version of this play, but much dumbed down for folks who probably would not get the references to Lavinia and all. Instead there's a tee-shirt reference to how "Cooks Do It..."
Because none of the actors is black, Othello is done as a black-style rap. To illustrate Will as a formula writer, basic parts of 16 comedies are amalgamated into the reduced comedy, "The Love Boat Goes to Verona."
When Michael is left on stage not just "in the moment", he calls an intermission. Most of what comes afterward is FST's Reduced Shakespeare Company's version of "Hamlet" -- not only the least abridged play but what, as a critic, I felt most worthwhile. Why? Because DePlanche does most of one soliloquy "straight" and thus gives those who love Shakespeare, or any real poetry for that matter, a few sublime moments in the midst of the ridiculous.
My favorite moment came when DePlanche made his fourth foray to the end of the front aisle and the stylish lady there seated. Three previous times, he had made it to her lap, whereupon he pretended to vomit. His fourth try found her with cane suddenly raised, prepared to pummel. Backing off, he was truly hilarious.
One cannot blame the players, who give their all. Mullen's voice and presence bespeak experience as a real Shakespearian actor. Daly is unflappable. DePlanche has unfailing energy as well as the nerve it takes to do some disgusting stuff. The many doors of set designer Lauren Feldman's symmetrical wood "library" walls adapt to scene and prop changes. They're too often used as reboant slap-squares, like slapsticks. Marcella Beckwith's costumes, as usual, are on the mark.
