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photo courtesy of Proctor Photographics
Laura J. Parker, Camille Watson, Benjamin Tarlton, and Glenn Griggs
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ShakesBEER II: The Bard Strikes Back
★★★
Through Thursday, May 3
Various venues, Triangle-wide
Shakespeare speaks to every age. Sometimes, though, he mumbles when he’s drunk.
That’s one takeaway from Bare Theatre's ShakesBEER II, a new comic collection of Shakespearean souses that’s making the rounds at local bars through this Thursday. (We saw it at Mystery Brewing Co. in Hillsborough; the remaining shows are at Durham's Ponysaurus on May 2 and Raleigh’s Imurj on May 3.)
As with the show’s first incarnation, adaptor Chuck Keith, director Dustin Britt, and a winning quartet of game young actors filter what performer Glenn Greggs calls “tales of a libatious nature” through risible pop-culture references and into a series of sketches.
The wordplay’s still witty. The company mocks its own segues and discusses failed gambits supposedly left on the cutting room floor (including an ABBA-based tribute that prompted Laura J. Parker to accuse Benjamin Tarlton, “You Mamma Mia’d Shakespeare, dude”). The acting’s rewarding when Camille Watson and Greggs face off as Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff in an excerpt from King Henry IV, Part I, and there are tasty nuggets of Elizabethan nerd-dom throughout, such as Shakespeare’s long-rumored connection to the bible's forty-sixth psalm—although we get only a glimpse when Parker begins what she calls “Shakespeare in the original Klingon.”
That problem crops up elsewhere when the brevity of some scenes prevents their full development. Tarlton’s rap riff is aborted before it reads as a take on Hamilton, and the cutaways to scenes from Twelfth Night and Othello in a ukulele-driven send-up of Cole Porter’s “Be a Clown” are finished before we get much sense of the characters and their situations. A similarly fuzzy sketch has Parker and Watson playing mob wives under an unclear threat when Antony and Cleopatra is plunged into the world of the film Goodfellas.
But comic invention livens up a poetic enactment of As You Like It’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech, and a deliberately woeful sci-fi version of Pyramus and Thisbe tilts the scales in the show’s favor. Further work on incipient scenes would add flavor to this drunken drama geek-fest.
★★★
Through Thursday, May 3
Various venues, Triangle-wide
Shakespeare speaks to every age. Sometimes, though, he mumbles when he’s drunk.
That’s one takeaway from Bare Theatre's ShakesBEER II, a new comic collection of Shakespearean souses that’s making the rounds at local bars through this Thursday. (We saw it at Mystery Brewing Co. in Hillsborough; the remaining shows are at Durham's Ponysaurus on May 2 and Raleigh’s Imurj on May 3.)
As with the show’s first incarnation, adaptor Chuck Keith, director Dustin Britt, and a winning quartet of game young actors filter what performer Glenn Greggs calls “tales of a libatious nature” through risible pop-culture references and into a series of sketches.
The wordplay’s still witty. The company mocks its own segues and discusses failed gambits supposedly left on the cutting room floor (including an ABBA-based tribute that prompted Laura J. Parker to accuse Benjamin Tarlton, “You Mamma Mia’d Shakespeare, dude”). The acting’s rewarding when Camille Watson and Greggs face off as Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff in an excerpt from King Henry IV, Part I, and there are tasty nuggets of Elizabethan nerd-dom throughout, such as Shakespeare’s long-rumored connection to the bible's forty-sixth psalm—although we get only a glimpse when Parker begins what she calls “Shakespeare in the original Klingon.”
That problem crops up elsewhere when the brevity of some scenes prevents their full development. Tarlton’s rap riff is aborted before it reads as a take on Hamilton, and the cutaways to scenes from Twelfth Night and Othello in a ukulele-driven send-up of Cole Porter’s “Be a Clown” are finished before we get much sense of the characters and their situations. A similarly fuzzy sketch has Parker and Watson playing mob wives under an unclear threat when Antony and Cleopatra is plunged into the world of the film Goodfellas.
But comic invention livens up a poetic enactment of As You Like It’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech, and a deliberately woeful sci-fi version of Pyramus and Thisbe tilts the scales in the show’s favor. Further work on incipient scenes would add flavor to this drunken drama geek-fest.
