THEATRE REVIEW

JULY 2025 | Volume 253

 

Neither of the two plays in Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival’s small tent this summer are by Shakespeare. In theory I don’t approve. In practice I found one of these plays a hilarious delight, the most enjoyable Bard production since the Beatles’ As You Like It, the other a semi-successful attempt at Shakespearian revisionism.

I had zero expectations for the Complete Works, 3rd version, which advertises itself as Shakespeare’s 37 plays in 90 minutes. It’s as silly as you might expect but very clever, too, with non-stop laughs from start to finish from its high-energy, sometimes frantic, cast of three.

The set-up: a strange cosmic voice tells the actors to replay Shakespeare’s Complete Works in 90 minutes or be turned into cider. Yes, cider. Why cider? Who knows, but the actors make it funny. Very, very funny. They are Craig Erickson, Tess Degenstein (both also in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) and either ArggyJenati or Nathan Kay from The Dark Lady. Jenati was in the show I saw. Mark Chavez directs with élan.

Ryan Cormack’s set has shelves and boxes filled with dozens, maybe hundreds of props from previous Bard shows along with Alaia Hamer’s old costume pieces. Changing plays and characters at top speed, the actors grab whatever props or costumes they need.

Anton Lipovetsky’s sound design includes some music and songs from the cosmos as well as from an old tape deck into which Erickson feeds cassettes, which all begin with a Christopher Gaze monologue, one a Gaze rap for the ages. The Bard on the Beach insider jokes are among the funniest parts of the show. (“If Dionysus and iambic pentameter had a baby, it would be Chris Gaze”). The actors’ dancing to Amanda Testini’s accelerated choreography is another treat.

The plays they perform include Titus Andronicus as a Hallmark Christmas movie, a very brief Beatles Cymbeline, a Coriolanus set in space, and an Othello in which “Moor” is not a North African character but something you do with a boat. Many of the “plays” take a minute or less, sixteen comedies are condensed into one, and ditto ten history plays plus King Lear.

Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet get the fullest treatments and the biggest laughs. R&J features the quickest and one of the funniest sword fights ever, while the sword fight in Hamlet—in which Horatio is called Fellatio—well, you have to see it for yourself. Tess Degenstein as Hamlet’s father’s Ghost has a couple of bits that almost had me on the floor, I was laughing so hard. The evening ends with the playwrights stealing the Two-Minute Hamlet from Tom Stoppard, then upping the ante with an even quicker encore, backwards.

All three performers are VERY funny but Degenstein has many of the best bits and throws herself into every role with ferocious comic energy. She seems the most natural clown of the three and can contort her body in astonishing ways. But all three have their excellent comic moments. What great fun and how exhausting it must be to perform this show.

This is one of my top recommendations for the summer. See it before it sells out.

 

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