Stage Reviews – Stories...
Backstage West Review:
Shakespeare has given us a host of love stories, tragic and comic, with lovers sometimes star-crossed, occasionally cross-dressed, now and then from different sides of the tracks or even residing in enemy camps. Befitting each tale, the love is true, but the road to its end, happy or not, is sabotaged with calamity. The one constant with these pairings is the beauty of the Bard’s words. Director Scott Werve takes seven of these couples, borrows snippets of dialogue and monologues, and mixes it all up into an adaptation that is about as clever as can be. To add another level, he sets his tale in a city of today, an urban backdrop with tenement, door stoops, cyclone fences, alleys, and corners to hang out on.
Here, Petruchio (Dan Roach) is a gangbuster, and his Kate (Kelli Ruttle) is a mechanic. Puck (Gugun Deep Singh) sells drugs, Ariel (Elizabeth Rick) is the local drunk, and a terrifically lovable, hilariously innocent and show-stealing Hamlet (Ryan Spahn) on roller skates wooes his love, Ophelia (Kellie Matteson), a prostitute, with valentines and Romeo’s words of love. And so it goes.
The large cast of players knows its iambic pentameter quite well. Each actor has taken on a character more than just bordering on caricature to ensure fun with the proceedings. Werve’s selections of text are likely recognizable to most folks attending a shot billed as a “collision of several Shakepearean romantice comedies” and Shakespeare’s words find humor in their application in situations given to different characters. Werve’s pacing is as crisp and bright as DC2’s (Danny Cistone and Davis Campbell) delightful production design and Abigail Nieto’s standout costuming. Chris Wolfe serves as assistant director, Jay Bolton’s lights and Werve’s sound complete the fine design.
LA Weekly Review:
GO: Shakespeare wrote prolifically about love, with the convoluted plots of his comedies often being as complex and bewildering as the passion itself. Seizing upon that idea, adapter-director Scott Werve’s inspired commingling of passages and characters from a dozen or so of the Bard’s plays is an homage both to Shakespeare’s genius and to Werve’s imaginative accomplishments. Werve sets the topsy-turvy events of his piece in an urban working-class neighborhood where, presided over by a tongue-clucking older couple, Don Antonio (John Ross Clark) and Titania (Marianne Ferrari), denizens gather on the front stoop to commiserate about the opposite sex.
While they bear Shakespearean names and speak lines exclusively from his writings, the characters all sport contemporary identities: nerdy Hamlet (Ryan Spahn) – referred to in the program as the “resident idiot”- skates around wearing hockey helmet and leg guars and woos a provocatively dressed hooker named Ophelia (Kellie Matteson). Meanwhile, after advising other gents how to score, oily Petruchio (Dan Roach) falls head over heels for (and is ultimately tamed by) an unsentimental auto mechanic named Kate (Kelli Ruttle). Sprinkled with comic desperation, the potpourri of love affairs is alternately abetted and obstructed by two local street hustlers, Puck and Ariel. In these roles, Gugun Deep Singh and Elizabeth Rick are wonderfully gifted clowns among an ensemble that rises to the challenge of juggling sophisticated language, scrambled metaphors and gleeful slapstick. (Deborah Klugman)
