THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED)… Santa Monica

Note: This is the show where three actors claim to perform all 37 plays in 90 minutes. It's been a huge success worldwide for 25 years but this was my first viewing. I actually enjoyed the show and, just for fun, wrote a satirical review by Will who, while admitting the audience loved it, was not amused. Turns out a lot of the people who read the review took it literally and thought I was saying the show was bad. I took it off my theater reviews blog but, hoping readers of my personal blog are more sophisticated, moved it here. So, you decide if Shakespeare's being over-sensitive or I'm being pretentious!  MMM


GUEST THEATER REVIEWER, MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 

In the year 1987, three young chaps from the brave New World, Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, made too much of a good thing when they played fast and loose with my entire canon. Well, according to the groundlings sitting around me last Sunday, laughing themselves into stitches at this latest revival, they obviously succeeded hilariously. This eyesore has been a roaring success for 26 years - my works a mere 400+ - but I suspect many of their contemporary references, e.g. to the Royal Kardashians, must have been added more recently. 
        Some of it went by so fast it set my teeth on edge and I could barely recognize my own plots or characters. They must think I’m a blinking idiot, then, to believe they covered ALL my comedies at one fell swoop? And I suspect foul play because my Royal Kings, in Battle for the Football Crown, was clearly pandering to an American fool’s paradise. The long and short of it is, they even mocked my tragedies – Othello, Macbeth and, stony-hearted villains, my masterpiece, Hamlet!

        This is written more in sorrow than in anger. However, where was the respect for my genius? How dare they make me a laughing stock, mock my work without rhyme or reason. Do they wish I was dead as a doornail? By Jove, it pierced my soul with regret that I ever left my manuscripts lying about the Globe dressing rooms so those damn actors, John Hemings and Henry Condell, could gather them up and publish them, thereby making them vulnerable to centuries of bad productions, weird concepts and now this bloody-minded farce.

         However, it is high time that I make corrections: I am not bald – I have a fringe. I never plagiarized, I merely improved on a lot of crap. It was bad enough that Richard Burbage and all those actors in The King’s Men fucked up my lines – now I have to suffer this mockery. They say I wrote 37 plays but really, have they never heard of The Two Noble Kinsman? How about The Reign of King Edward the Third? Even better, The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle and A Yorkshire Tragedy.*

The Murder of Julius Caesar!

The actors Lucas Kwan Peterson, Eric Bloom and Mike Niedzwicki, all refuse to stand on ceremony as they bid me good riddance, and the director, Sarah Gurfield, makes a virtue of necessity as she sends me packing. 

But what the dickens, it is all one to me. I return to my grave. The rest is silence...

Produced By Bart Petty for Santa Monica Repertory Theater, At The Promenade Playhouse, 1404 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica, through June 30.

Tickets: (213) 268-1454 or www.santamonicarep.org

 

 

*For verification and enlightment go to www.shakespeareinc.com and my illustrious friend Paul Sugarman, of The Instant Shakespeare Company, will fill you in on further discoveries.