During the latter two years of high school, as year-end projects, I participated in a number of theatrical productions which were written by and starring myself and my group members. There was Moby Dick the Musical, in which I played Ishmael and sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to His Taste” about Queequeg. At the end of my senior year we did a Durbeyfield TV Telethon in which I was Hamlet (another musical, set to Offenbach and involving me doing the Can Can), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (with a truly bad West Country accent), and in a commercial for Out Damned Spot cleaner from Macbeth. The reason I mention all this is because, along with my Doctor Who the Musical parodies, it’s work of this vein that CwoWS (abridged) brings to mind.
I hadn’t realized I’d seen the show before (albeit, with a touring company that may have been the original cast) until we got to the very end, where the audience participates in bringing out Ophelia’s subtext. For the three actors who play a) themselves, b) personas of themselves written by the three original playwrights, c) all the characters Shakespeare ever wrote, it’s a demanding show, physically and otherwise. We saw them at their last performance, so perhaps they were at their most hyper. While I laughed and found parts very clever, the show seems to have been written in the same frame of mind as DW The Musical, simply because in that I don’t limit myself at all: anything goes, no matter how insulting, crass, or insane (which is odd, since I am in real life quite a gentle person)—which is what goes on here. Except instead of from the mind of a girl, it’s from the minds of three men. The distinction is crucial.
So am I saying that if this can get produced, DW the Musical should be? Well, perhaps, but I guess my main point is that I can see why a friend of mine walked out. The first ten minutes are not that funny and perhaps not what anyone expects—there’s an aura of strain, of that painfully earnest Acting you see in high school productions. Once the adaptations start, however, the play picks up speed. Obviously, it’s personal preference as to which interpretations amuse you the most.
My personal favorite was Titus Andronicus as a cooking show in which chefs with stumps for hands bake a human head at “350∙!” This was both an arch rendering of a play written during Shakespeare’s “Tarentino” phase and silly, ridiculous fun[1]. Macbeth was shouted with unintelligible Scottish accents (and included a painful, but good, joke about abortion). The brief Julius Caesar was highlighted by Caesar screaming, “What the hell is that [the Ides of March]?” before being stabbed; Mark Antony exclaimed, “Friends, Romans, countrymen . . . I come to bury Caesar—so let’s get on to my much better play, Antony and Cleopatra!” (Which consisted of Scott Bryan wearing a giant snake and pretending to vomit into the audience—“Scott”’s idea of death throes. It was then calmly explained to him that Shakespeare’s heroines did not meet their ends with vomiting.)
Romeo and Juliet was, with the exception of Hamlet, the play most paid attention to. I’m not sure why, other than because a lot of the speeches just sound nice and it’s an easy in road into the plays since there’s love, violence, and a recognizable plot. My favorite part of this was the end, where the Chorus is supposed to say the Epilogue but was interrupted by kazoo music and a tiny guitar. The Comedies were all, disappointingly, lumped into one play, (point taken, they’re somewhat formulaic) which I couldn’t hear very well. Othello, which was done as a white-boy rap, was also practically unintelligible; it may have been very funny but I couldn’t hear it. Likewise the Histories (and King Lear) were part of a football game of tossing the crown, which was amusing, but I wanted more Richard III.
I enjoyed a discussion of “Chernobyl Kinsmen” and Timon of Athens, as a footnote and interpretative dance involving an inflatable T-Rex and a penguin toy. I liked the jibes at Tricklock Theatre and Rio Rancho. (Hmmm, this is beginning to sound like panto.) Scott running off in horror at the prospect of performing Hamlet was a slight copout of an intermission, though obviously the actors were probably about to collapse by that point, so a necessary copout. (And hey, if it included Ryan Jason Cook, who played Christian in Cyrano, taking off his shirt, it couldn’t be all bad, could it?)
Hamlet is my favorite play, however unimaginative that preference may be, and the fifteen-, five-, and one-minute Hamlets are classic. The characterization of Hamlet’s “north-northwest” madness was as good as any legitimate rendering I’ve seen, and Scott (once again) as Gertrude was hilarious. The ending—I did a paper on “The rest is silence”—was almost done straight and was even a bit moving.
Despite the irreverent attitude taken here, it is my belief that “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, parody the second most sincere.” There is definitely a genuine respect for the Bard running underneath all this chicanery, and I think in some ways it gets back to the very roots of Shakespeare’s age of drama. The physical humor—which the actors did really, really well—is the essence of crowd-pleasing theatre. At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, there was balking over Romeo (Ryan) and Juliet (Scott) kissing. (“I don’t wanna kiss you, Ryan!” “It’s in the script!” And after they did, an unfortunate child toward the front said, “Ewww,” to which Ryan gave the surprisinglky caustic and certainly ad-libbed, “Oh, grow up.”) This is surely a nod to the fact women weren’t allowed on the stage for a long time. Though Dan’s character claimed to be an expert on Shakespeare, having read two books about him, the writers are a bit more familiar with the canon than they pretend.
Last performance-enthusiasm must have been infectious, as I left feeling both exhausted and exhilarated. Isn’t that how Shakespeare should make you feel?
[1] It also struck a chord since in Nunsense, the only actual show I ever acted in, there was a cooking scene where the nuns try to sell cookbooks.
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