Word: compleat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Speed is the principle pleasure of The Compleat Works of Wllm. Shkspre. (Abridged), showing through August 8 at the Hasty Pudding Theatre. From the beginning, the play's trio of actors (Erik Amblad, Will Burke and Adam "Waka" Green) plainly state their mission--to present all of Shakespeare's plays--and take off like horses from a starting gate. They begin with a comparably lengthy rendition of Romeo and Juliet, continue with truncated versions of the Tragedies, and, with time running short, condense the Comedies into a skit in double time, and further distill the Histories into a few symbolic...
...COMPLEAT WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED) Directed by Michael Roiff Produced by Benjamin Forkner and Jessica Shapiro October 22-24 Loeb Experimental Theater...
...premise behind The Compleat Works of Wllm Shakspr (abridged) is simple and stunning. A reduced cast, with reduced props, reduces the entire body of Shakespeare's work into a svelte two-hour fling whose high purpose is to reintroduce to Shakespearean Production the lost quality of side-splitting humor...
...traveled several continents, it continues to have about it an air of freshly improvised parody. As with improv, the humor has an underdeveloped quality--potential jokes are left unexploited while the existent ones lack the sharpness of revision. Like the movie Wag the Dog, the premise of Compleat Works is loaded with humorous potential that remains largely unmined. Lines like "a nose by any other name would still smell" are funny but pale when compared to the sardonic text-twisting of Tom Stoppard's comparable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead...
Though the lack of plot continuity adds comic flair to the most serious interchanges, the text of The Compleat Wrks really isn't much different than what you'd find on 10 randomly selected pages of the Riverside Edition. With men playing women, pathetic melodrama, the overuse of gaudy props (i.e. silly string which makes several repeat appearances as a vomit substitute) one begins to wonder if this isn't Shakespeare as it was meant to be. A frequent object of ridicule throughout the show are Shakespeare companies that fret about making Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences. The show suggests...