Imagine three not-all-that-talented actors who took maybe two semesters of Shakespeare among them (and slept through most of that), deciding to stage the entire canon of Shakespeare’s work in a single evening.
Imagine them deciding on the fly who plays what part, what they can use for costumes, and what they can grab for props to kill Julius Caesar and Macbeth — for sure, not a sword or an axe. That’s a brief taste of “Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged” which will hit the stage at Arizona Rose Theatre starting Saturday, Feb. 29. Director Mark Klugheit gives us four reasons to see the play.
- You like to laugh. This play has run for more than 20 years, been revised and updated, and delighted audiences in London, New York, and pretty much everywhere. “Bawdy, irreverent, and sublimely entertaining,” says The Miami Herald; “pithier than Python,” echoes The New York Times; and “the funniest show you are likely to see in your lifetime,” declares The Montreal Gazette. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
- You like Shakespeare. Well, it’s all there, everything you love: the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, the “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet, Viola and Sebastian’s gender-bending frisson from Twelfth Night, and hunchback Richard’s agonizing cry for his horse. Not to mention a reference to every Shakespearian opus you’ve ever heard of, and a few you probably haven’t. And, as a bonus, all 154 sonnets — in their entirety. Think we can’t do it in 97 minutes? Come find out.
- You hate Shakespeare. Think Shakespeare was boring and pretentious, full of words you couldn’t understand and plots you couldn’t follow? Well, so do our actors, so they’ve decided to pepper their performance with invocations of every great movie from Rocky to Godzilla. Not to mention a couple of TV classics, a Strauss waltz, fireworks, a football game and a little Charli XCX hip-hop. We promise Shakespeare you can’t fall asleep at.
- You like to laugh. See Nos. 1, 2 and 3, above.
