DANE OF THRONES

All systems are 'go' in Hamlet, the centerpiece production of this year's Santa Cruz Shakespeare season. The acting is impressive at every level, and the action trots along with clarity, focus and feeling. Director Susan Dalian updates the famous tale of political murder, moral corruption, and generational angst into the post-assassination JFK/Mad Men era, which makes enough sense to complement, not distract from the drama.

To recap: The King of Denmark has died suddenly, and his brother, Claudius, has assumed the king's throne and married the king's wife, Queen Gertrude. The royal son, Prince Hamlet, home from school abroad for his father's funeral, is already shocked by his mother's hasty marriage to his uncle when the ghost of his father tells Hamlet he was murdered by Claudius and demands vengeance. 

Much of the play revolves around Hamlet's soul-searching, as he grapples with grief and rage: must he avenge his father's murder? What happens if he does? Can he live with himself if he does not? Is life worth living at all? Meanwhile, he pretends to be mad, spouting wordplay and foolery, hoping to throw the plotters off-guard and learn the truth about his father's death — and decide what to do about it. 

As Hamlet, incoming SCS Artistic Director Charles Pasternak makes a grand, rampaging feast of the part. Roaring in outrage, heartfelt in despair, he can shift in an instant into nimble verbal dancing and witty asides, baiting the pompous and the less intellectually adroit. It's a Herculean, often riveting  performance that never quite loses its grounding in life-sized human emotion. 

Mike Ryan plays the treacherous Claudius with glib, glad-handing duplicity. As Gertrude, Marion Adler seems hopefully pragmatic at first, trying to restore peace to her recently disrupted court, but gradually descends into aching remorse the "crazier" and more reproachful her son becomes. There's more collateral damage in Ophelia, Hamlet's paramour, daughter of the king's counselor, Polonius. Allie Pratt plays her as a fragile, innocent flower child driven genuinely out of her mind by Hamlet's pretended lunacy. 

By far the most arresting supporting character in this production in Polonius, gender-switched from a befuddled, cliche-spouting, out-of-touch doddering father, as the role is usually played, into a socially scheming mother. The remarkable Paige Lindsey White gives us an interfering mother of dynamic, aggressive cluelessness, eager to enforce the romantic and social protocols of her own bygone era, and thus prove worthy to meddle in the schemes of her royal in-laws-to-be. White's Polonius is a vividly entertaining comic figure, right up to the moment she's undone by her own hubris, daring to believe (mistakenly, as it turns out) that she's sly enough to match wits with the pros in ruthless court politics. 

Jono Eiland and Elliot Sagay are pleasantly accommodating as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (not necessarily in that order, although no one is ever quite sure), Hamlet's school friends recruited by Claudius to spy on his antagonistic step-son. Charlotte Munson is effective as Horatio, Hamlet's confidant, and the play's moral and rational center, and the ever exuberant Patty Gallagher pops up as the Player King, head of a troupe of actors hired by Hamlet to stage an incendiary drama about regicide. Raphael Nash Thompson brings his sonorous voice and formidable presence to the vengeful Ghost. 

Austin Blake Conlee's costumes run toward relaxed mens' suits and chic linen dress ensembles in popsicle pastel colors, accompanied by wigmistress Jessica Carter's extravagant mid-60s bouffants. Luke Shepherd's smart, subtle, insinuating sound design enhances the action at every turn. 

This is the fourth production of Hamlet mounted by the company since its original inception as Shakespeare Santa Cruz in 1981. The first production of the play, way back in 1985, starred a young Brit recently imported from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Paul Whitworth, in the title role. 

Incidental characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were played by Danny Scheie and Jack Zerbe, who also got to star in a concurrent production of Tom Stoppard's hilarious existential comedy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which played on alternate nights with Hamlet throughout the season. 

This was momentous casting for the company, since both Scheie and then Whitworth would go on to serve tenures as Artistic Director. 

Me, I loved both productions so much, I channeled my inner Al Hirschfield and drew this cartoon, commemorating the season! 

 

Hamlet plays in repertoire through August 31st in the Audrey Stanley Grove at Delaveaga Park.

SEA CHANGE

Heads up, Shakespeare fans! Our own Santa Cruz Shakespeare has announced its lineup for this year's summer festival season — and since it revolves around two of my favorite Shakespeare plays, I could not be more excited!

As in recent summers past, the season opener will be a non-Shakespearean offering, in this case A Flea In Her Ear, the classic French farce by Georges Feydeau, from the turn of the last century. This story of marital mistrust, miscommunication, mistaken identities and reconciliation gets a spanking new adaptation by David Ives (whose adaptation of Moliere's The Liar, back in 2015, was one of the funniest productions in the company's history).

Next up will be Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's lively comedy of romantic complications when a young woman shipwrecked on a foreign shore disguises herself as a young man to seek employment. Full of swift banter, unrequited passion, even a little swordplay, it's an adroit comedy of love, gender, and identity that never goes out of style.

Cut-out poster, Pratt Institute, 2012

But I may be most excited about The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, and the grand finale of his career, a gorgeous feast of magic and redemption. Duke Prospero, the sorcerer, is usurped by his conniving brother and exiled with his daughter to an uncharted island. With help of his spirit familiars, he causes a shipwreck that delivers his enemies into his power for a day of retribution, romance, and — ultimately — reconciliation.

The Tempest is categorized as a romance (what we might call in modern parlance magic realism), depending on magic, spells, and sorcery to advance the plot. With its scheming royals, drunken clowns, young lovers, antic, otherworldly spirits, disappearing banquets, and exuberant pageantry (as well as its undercurrent of slavery vs. freedom), its effects can be as subtle or spectacular as the playmakers can dream up. 

One previous production of the play (in the company's former incarnation as Shakespeare Santa Cruz) used Balinese shadow puppets and masks to convey the magical elements. In another, director Danny Scheie riffed on Gilligan's Island, with uneven results, but also included a magnificent Ariel, Prospero's chief magical minion, soaring above the action on a trapeze.

The Tempest a la Balinese

A more recent production, set in the Art Noveau era, emphasized the story's humanism, the burgeoning cult of Nature, and the merging of spiritualism with the supernatural.

This will be the company's fourth production of The Tempest, and its first-ever helmed by Artistic Director Mike Ryan, making his debut in the director's chair. I can't wait! Especially since my next novel (under construction as we speak) imagines the further adventures of Prospero's daughter!

The recurring themes of shipwreck and redemption in this year's playlist prompts Ryan to adopt Sea Change as this season's unofficial title. As he explains it, “All of our 2020 plays center around someone (or someones) who are shipwrecked, sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally, and sometimes in both ways. These stories ask questions about how we find our way past disaster, impotence, and emotional stagnancy to find fertile ground in renewed joy, love, and hope.”

Finding our way past disaster through love and hope could not be more timely, in our current cultural climate. But, here, I'll let Mike tell you all about it himself!

Meanwhile — full steam ahead!

RANDOM ACTS OF LUNACY

Julie James and Danny Scheie: frenzied plots

Orton's crazed spirit lives in JTC's hilarious 'What the Butler Saw'

Spoiler alert: there is no butler in What the Butler Saw. But there's plenty to see and enjoy in Joe Orton's scabrously funny 1967 comedy as performed by the Jewel Theatre Company. It's a slamming-door farce in which the set's four doors repeatedly slam, identities are mistaken, switched, disguised and deconstructed, thwarted sexuality drives the plot, and anarchy runs riot over all. 

In other words, business as usual for Orton, the working-class Brit whose subversively witty comedies blazed across the London theatre scene during his brief mid-1960s career.

Yes, this production references the '60s, from the British Invasion soundtrack that greets audiences on the way to their seats, to B. Modern's mod-influenced costumes. But Orton's comic style is timeless; his tweaking of authority and cheeky disdain for hallowed traditions and bourgeois propriety would be equally at home on a 16th-Century Commedia dell'arte stage or last night's cable TV comedy series. And the excellent JTC team mines the material for every possible laugh.

Josh Saleh, Mike Ryan, Audrey Rumsby: gender-switched

This production continues JTC's fertile association with Shakespeare Santa Cruz alumni. Director Art Manke (whose credits include the wonderful The Three Musketeers) stages the piece with verve and clarity. 

Mike Ryan notches up another entertaining performance as the head of a tony private psychiatric clinic, whose aborted attempt to seduce his dewy new secretary, and his increasingly frazzled attempts to conceal this fact from his virago wife (expertly played by Julie James), lead to mayhem in Orton's frisky plot. 

Ryan and Saleh: anarchy vs. propriety

 Also on board is the hilarious Danny Scheie as another shrink, visiting the clinic on behalf of the British government. As the principal authority figure, it's his function to misinterpret evidence, misconstrue motives, and misdiagnose everyone else as a raving lunatic—and Scheie wrings the most out of every syllable of caustic observation and gleeful epiphany.

Audrey Rumsby, as the secretary, and Josh Saleh as a bellhop roped into the action are delightful as the young innocents caught up in the crazed lies and schemes of their elders; they are the ones most often stripped down to their skivvies and forced to switch clothes and genders to suit the others' frenzied plotting.

The message here is that no amount of personal aplomb or official prestige can save you from random acts of lunacy in the Orton universe. (Read more)

(The JTC production of What the Butler Saw plays through May 25 at Center Stage in Sant Cruz. Visit the JTC website for ticket info.)

Photos by Steve DiBartolomeo, WestsideStudio Image.

DOUBLE YOUR FUN

Longtime local theatergoers may remember Danny Scheie's original staging of The Comedy of Errors as possibly the single funniest production ever mounted at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Premiered in the 1988 season and encored in 1993, it made full use of the outdoor Festival Glen, including a bicycle-built-for-four that came roaring down the hillside, and a massive upstage wall with Laugh-In style open-and-shut windows that turned Shakespeare's frolicsome early comedy about two sets of twins, mistaken identities, and male-female relations into a literal slamming-door farce.

In celebration of SSC's 30th Anniversary season, Scheie returns with a lively reboot of The Comedy of Errors. Although scaled back for the indoor Mainstage with John Iacovelli's single, functional wall and a couple of chairs for a set, and eight intrepid performers handling some 20 speaking parts, this Comedy retains all of the laughs. Indeed, the smaller venue adds a whole extra layer of laughs when we can see all the actors' facial expressions, while giving Scheie the chance to further hone his brilliant idea of a somewhat seedy troupe of traveling players putting on a show for "the rubes."

Terrific SSC stalwarts Mike Ryan and Brad DePlanche play dual roles as two sets of twins—the traveler, Antipholus of Syracuse, and his manservant, Dromio, who wreak havoc in Ephesus when they're mistaken for their local counterparts, twin brothers from whom both were separated in infancy. (Read more)

(Above: Jonathan Shue, Mike Ryan and Brad DePlanche. Photo by rr jones.)

RIP-ROARING

'Zounds, this Friday is William Shakespeare's birthday, and I didn't even send a card. But never mind; there'll be festivties aplenty this summer when Shakespeare Santa Cruz presents its ambitious 30th Anniversary Season. Artistic Director Marco Barricelli has a full slate in store for local theatregoers: three plays in repertory (Henry IV, Part 1, The Comedy Of Errors, and The Three Musketeers), plus a Fringe production this summer (July 19-August 28), a special fall benefit show in November (Bard Babes), and the return of the beloved Holiday Musical (A Year With Frog & Toad).

It's a swashbuckling lineup. The mayhem is comic in Comedy, a knockabout farce of mistaken identities where two pairs of identical male twins cause havoc for wives, lovers, servants, and each other. SSC had a huge hit with Danny Scheie's riotous Laugh-In-style staging of the play in 1988 (re-mounted in 1993), possibly the single most entertaining SSC production ever. And since Scheie is such a tough act to follow, Scheie himself will be back in the director's chair, reprising, reinventing, and updating the material for the new season.

(Btw, the summer's Fringe production will be The Brothers Menaechmus, the orginal Roman comedy by Plautus that inspired Shakespeare's Comedy, directed by Patty Galagher and performed by the company's intrepid acting interns.)

HVP1 is a testosterone-infused adventure in which roistering slacker Prince Hal breaks the spell of genial old reprobate Falstaff, his mentor in vice, and starts embracing his inner king-to-be. The last time it was staged at SSC, in 1984, local audiences were introduced to a young actor fresh from the Royal Shakespeare Company as Prince Hal: Paul Whitworth. Done up in long hair and Cleopatra eye makeup, Boy George-style (hey, it was the '80s), he made his first entrance on a motorcycle, hoisting a six-pack of brewskis. (That's Paul and his Falstaff, Tony Church, in an excellent photo by maestro Shmuel Thaler.) This new production will be directed by fan favorite Scott Wentworth (he has recently played Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Brutus in Julius Caesar). It's to be the first in the "Henriad" trilogy that SSC plans to tackle in toto, Henry IV, Part Two coming in 2012, and Henry V in 2013.

And the roistering continues in The Three Musketeers, one of my all-time favorite swashbuckling properties. I adore the Dumas novel, and I never miss a movie version (more about that in a future blog), but I've never seen it live, onstage, and I am so stoked! Best of all, director Art Manke is staging it outside in the Festival Glen, so there'll be plenty of room for clashing blades, scandalous seductions, and boisterous bonhomie. I don't know about you, but I can't wait.

Read all about the season on the SSC website. Season Tickets & Group Tickets are on sale as we speak; Single Tickets to individual plays go on sale May 17. In the meantime, brush up your Shakespeare, sharpen your blades, and get ready for some rip-roaring summer theatre.