The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
By Adam Long, Daniel Singer & Jess Winfield
Directed by Richard Width
The Garden Theatre, Winter Garden FL</strong>
The bard wrote 884,647 words on 118,406 lines, so clearly something has to be cut. The editing will be tough – even with “King John” and “Coriolanus” and all the out-of-date fart jokes are off the table, only real pros can strip out that single hour’s worth good jokes from this near-biblical canon of English literature. That job falls to GAS (Garden Abridged Shakespeare), lead by the hugely funny Jay Hopkins. Assisting him is the energetic Will Hagaman and the impetuous Chris Pruett, and they begin by dismembering “Romeo And Juliet”. The faux balcony in the Garden Theatre begs for this treatment, and Hagaman get to make that long climb while Hopkins Friar offers the advice “Drugs are great. Take lots of them.” It’s the only good advice the young lovers get in the whole play, and when Romeo dies, Juliet admits today was an “Icky poo poo wee wee day.”
The GAS guys don’t have time to go over every single couplet, but they pass around a sheet of sonnets and give us “Titus Andronicus” as a cable TV cooking show, “Othello” as a Hip Hop number, and all the Henry’s as college football game. The jokes are fast and furious, and a constant stream of contemporary updates keeps the script fresh – “Avatar” jokes and political reference fly over your head, and if one gag fails the next hits hard. The entire second act is devoted to Hamlet, which Pruitt refuses to play, claiming it has “too many words”. Well, yes, it’s like C-SPAN without the humor, but he relents and Hageman plays Gertrude with a vomiting problem, and Hopkins shows he can wield a sword as well as take one like a rat in the arris. With a small but chatty audience, this show worked harder than it should have to get laughs. Without close knowledge of Shakespeare, your still likely to have a wonderful time – the stale jokes are gone, and the comedies aren’t half as funny as the tragedies.
For a complete listing of events at The Garden Theatre in Winter garden, please visit http://wgtheater.org</em>
