How dare they? This isn’t one of your regular bards we’re talking about. This is the bard, the immortal bard: the one and only William Shakespeare, The Greatest Writer In The English Language (™), the…the…the Shakespeare of his time.
Well, dare they did. The result of that daring—The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)—can be seen through June 28th at Grand Rapids Circle Theatre. Don’t be intimidated by the title: the farce crams all the plays (and sonnets) into an hour and a half, yes, but, though exhaustive, it’s never exhausting, and while it helps a little to know something about his plays, my two oldest daughters knew almost nothing, and they still had a blast. Yes, there are soliloquies, but there’s also comic vomiting. Probably more vomiting than soliloquies, all told.
Shakespeare’s directed by Tom Kaechele, whose direction of The Play That Goes Wrong was a recent high point in Grand Rapids theater. Like that play, this one constantly seems in danger of whirling to pieces in the best possible way. It stars three game, energetic men: Aaron (Eding), Ryan (Jarosch), and Brad (Sytsma), whose goal is to put on a great show—or, failing that, to get offstage before the creepy adult puppet guy’s due on.
While some plays are mentioned only in passing, others get a more extended treatment, notably Romeo and Juliet. Audience members who swoon over or suffered through the play in high school will be familiar with the beats but not the beat-boxing. Those who read or saw Coriolanus won’t be surprised by the blood, but there are surprises in store (imagine a slightly more deranged Alton Brown). As these short, manic versions of the plays play out, actors switch roles with Nascar speed, peeling off and tossing on personae as quickly as someone else might change outfits—and changing outfits is something else they do, speedily and often. Saving them from unintended wardrobe malfunctions: costume designer Mackenzie Moira.
You can’t get through more than three dozen plays (also the sonnets!) without a little bit of rushing, of course. The comedies, which few of us can tell apart anyway, get mashed together, leaving a vague impression of islands, twins, magic, and marriage. The histories become a single football game, which makes sense when you see it. Well, more or less.
Such good time do the actors make that, by the time intermission’s due to start, they think they might have gotten through everything. That’s good news when you have a creepy adult puppet guy waiting in the wings. But there’s one title remaining, a play so well-known that it seems to be a pile of quotations stitched into one glorious quilt: Hamlet. You know: the one with the skull.
Many of the funniest moments take place in the second act, as the wheels fall off. Ophelia, played by Jarosch as a skipping, laughing, shrieking lunatic, gets a lot of laughs, but so does every other character, too, from the value meal version of Hamlet’s ghost to that titular great Dane himself.
Here, as elsewhere, the language has been updated to speak to our current (and depressing) moment, but rarely in a heavy-handed way. Mostly, this show remains what it’s always been: an escape, poised somewhere between the mildness of a sitcom and the insanity of Monty Python—and closer to the latter than the former.
If it indulges in bawdy humor, well, so did Shakespeare. This play might not reach to the heavens the way his best work did, but he shared the clear affection it shows for the mud. The three actors should be, and were, applauded for rolling in it with such aplomb. It’s undoubtedly harder than it looks; each had to do, and say, quite a bit, and they did it without ever stumbling.
There are no As for effort in art, of course. But there are As for entertaining audiences. Based on the thunderous reaction the evening I saw the play, this report card’s going on the fridge. Speaking of fridges, don’t try the ladyfingers.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [Abridged]
Circle Theatre
June 12-28
https://circletheatre.org/production/the-complete-works-of-william-shakespeare-abridged/
