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by the Reduced Shakespeare Company
directed by Jim Helsinger Presented by
Not to be confused with the preeminent British company bearing the same initials, the RSC's The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) is a nutty, three-person romp through everything ol' Bill ever wrote...all 37 plays in less than two hours! Hailed by the Montreal Gazette as "the funniest show you are likely to see in your entire lifetime," The Compleat Works... will have you laughing till your sides ache.
Winner of The Lillie Stoates Award for Best Play.Opens November 13 - 30, 1997
Previews November 7,8,9 & 12, 1997
R.Width, P.Nolen
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Eric Hissom
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Reviews Date: November 19, 1997
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theater Critic This Bard is "Compleatly" Amusing. There's No Room for the Hoity-Toity in this Shakespeare Roundup: Undiluted Hilarity Reigns Riotously Supreme |
| Say you see two guys butting heads. Steam is practically pouring out of their ears, they're making high-pitched squealing noises and one of them just stuck his fingers in the other guy's eyes. What you're seeing is either: a) two of the Three Stooges, or b) Shakespeare. Take your choice. If you picked b, you still may have only an ounce of an idea of the mayhem committed nightly in the Bard of Avon's name in The Compleat Works of Wllm Shakspr (abridged), the cartoonlike comedy in which three actors from the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival spend two hours trying to perform every one of Shakespeare's 37 plays. That's three-seven, as in three dozen plus one, and if you leave Compleat Works a little hazy about who did what to whom in Titus Andronicus, it will be because you wisely split a gut laughing rather than trying to figure it out. The gory Titus Andronicus turns into a Julia Childlike cooking show complete with bloodletting, and all 16 comedies metamorphose into an underwater version of Uncle Vanya in this wildly irreverent comedy, which the Shakespeare festival's three actors perform, true to form, in wildly energetic style. The festival performers didn't make this thing up (that dubious honor belongs to a British group called the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which also performs an abridged version of the Bible) but Orlando audiences reap the benefits all the same. | Everything high-falutin goes flying out the window in Compleat Works, in which one performer, Eric Hissom, is introduced as one of Bithlo's reigning Shakespearean scholars; another, Philip Nolen, is left to fall apart onstage when his fellow actors desert him and the third, Richard Width, spends much of the play in flowing wigs and skirts. It won't hurt you going into this production to know the plot of King John - although you may be forced to recite it onstage. For once, though, little or no knowledge of Shakespeare is plenty here, and anyone who is aware only that a tailback is different from a hunchback will do just fine. There's no way to praise Compleat Works adequately without revealing too many of its ridiculous surprises and ruining the experience for everyone involved. Suffice it to say that each of the three actors finds personality in his part (Width a dopey ingenuousness, Nolen a dorky sense of duty and Hissom a ferocious intensity that would be scary in other circumstances), that the production includes enough semi-obscure local references to make Orlandoans feel at home and that director Jim Helsinger brings the thing off with high style and what looks like comic abandon, which looks easy but is never so easily achieved. Not taking Shakespeare seriously has never been so much fun. |
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