Jim Helsinger, John Jezior, Steve Lewis and Paul Vogt in The Comedy of Errors
Two men meet in the street. Both of them are wearing big hats. When they bow to each other, their heads nearly touch, and somehow, in the bowing, their hats end up on each other's heads. As they continue to bow, the hats keep getting passed from one head to the other. By the time they're done, there's no telling which hat belongs to which man. All you know is that it's funny. The wordless little scene that opens the Orlando Shakespeare Festival's production of The Comedy of Errors could have come from a Laurel and Hardy movie or from a 100-year-old burlesque routine. That this bit of inspired silliness springs from Shakespeare - and that its roots lie in the Roman comedies of 22 centuries ago - makes you realize just how far we haven't come. The Comedy of Errors is like that - filled with the oldest of comic bits and all the funnier for them. When director Stuart Omans allows the silliness in Shakespeare to grow and flourish of its own accord, this production feels joyously empty-headed, like a night at the opera with the Marx Brothers or an afternoon with the monkeys at the zoo. Buoyed by clear skies and a half moon high over Lake Eola Park, that heady feeling was everywhere Thursday night when the festival opened its production of The Comedy of Errors. The park's amphitheater may have been less than half full, but hooting and hollering from 450 people can sound as pleasurable as hooting and hollering from 1,000. There's almost always silliness in Shakespeare, but The Comedy of Errors is as silly as they come - a mostly simple-minded farce in which two sets of twins are separated as babies and wind up confusing everyone when they meet again as adults. Antipholus of Syracuse, in Greece, and his servant Dromio arrive in the Asian port of Ephesus and find themselves constantly mistaken for two other people with the same names. (If you want to know why parents would give both of their twin sons the same name, you're too literal-minded for farce.) The two, having decided that everyone in Ephesus is bewitched or mad, are about to flee when they discover not only their long-missing twins but also Antipholus' lost parents, who themselves have been separated for many years. What this story boils down to is an extended mistaken-identity routine, and when two gifted actors are available to carry it off, it can't be beat. This show has them in Jim Helsinger and John Jezior, who play not only Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse but also Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus, and whose who's-on-first routines have the comfortable feel of two guys who have been performing together for years. | They're at their best as the naive, good-natured pair from Syracuse. Helsinger's Antipholus has a grave sweetness about him, and Jezior's Dromio has a heartier, more rollicking air; when the two of them are entertaining each other - describing the dubious appeal of a kitchen maid, or participating in a quick bout of charades - they're irresistible. All the other roles are minor, although Suzanne O'Donnell makes a comical spitfire of Adriana, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, and Paul C. Vogt makes the most of a fey merchant to whom that same Antipholus owes money. A few of the other performances aren't as interesting as they might be. But the largest problem in Comedy is with the odd paths down which Omans and designer Samuel C. Ball take the production, which are confusing more often than not. Take, for example, the mannequins that people the stage throughout and add nothing to the goings-on. Take the routine about baldness in which Omans has Antipholus and Dromio pulling a couple of men out of the audience; the fact, on opening night, that neither one was balding only added to the two actors' losing control. Or take the routine in which Dromio, on one side of a door obscured by what look like mini-blinds, is supposed to be speaking to the other Dromio on the other side of the door. The taped voice supplied for the second Dromio sounds fake, and the constant clumsy shifting of the blinds to show us that second Dromio just distracts from the proceedings. Yet Ball's set is exotically colorful - especially its wonderful revolving door, through which confused people are always careening - and Omans moves the show at such a pace that his missteps hardly matter. In fact, nothing much matters in this Comedy of Errors - nothing but laughter, and that's a lot. |
