on the Main Stage at Spokane Civic Theater through April 19
Make the screwball even screwier, and director Wes Deitrick will have created a complete comedy in the farcical romp through A Midsummer Night's Dream that is playwright Ken Ludwig's Shakespeare in Hollywood (at the Civic through April 19).
Deitrick kicks off the show delightfully with fake vintage newsreels of the Civic's cast, shot as if they're arriving at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Ludwig's comedy, you see, imagines the what-if when Oberon and Puck — the characters ... you know, Shakespeare's real-life (!) fairies — were to time-travel to 1935 and get mixed up in Max Reinhardt's mistaken-identity Midsummer movie, with its art deco look and celebrities substituting for experienced stage actors.
Ludwig's script calls for a lot of exposition, so we'll be up on who the studio mogul, director, actors and moral crusader were. Fortunately, most of the narration falls to Jamie Flanery as Max Reinhardt, the Austrian director on the run from the Nazis and hoping to make a prestige picture. Flanery deadpans his jokes, fuming over these American philistines almost as much as he does his German oppressors.
The master Shakespearean here is Damon C. Mentzer as Oberon (low bow, distinguished British baritone), King of the Fairies. At various points, Mentzer gives us snippets of Oberon's Midsummer poetry, lending a little plausibility to an airy spirit being mistaken for a real-life actor. When he cuddles cheek to cheek with Kristin McKernan (as ingénue Olivia de Havilland, all quivering blonde ringlets), you can practically see the glints on Mentzer's teeth.
As the producer's main squeeze, Anne Lillian Mitchell brays her Bronx accent and sashays her star quality all over the office of producer Jack Warner (Ric Benson). Like Judy Holiday in Born Yesterday, she wants so much to master all this high-falutin' Shake-speah, only to let the guttersnipe show through when it's least convenient. Playing a broad with pretensions, Mitchell conveyed both stupidity and vulnerability in an effective star turn.
As Puck — Oberon's merry prankster of a sidekick — diminutive Kathie Doyle-Lipe manages at times, however, to be as bothersome as Mickey Rooney was in the ‘30s movie. (And if you've seen Rooney's pop-up gopher mannerisms and hyper-ventilating, screechy cackles, you know how annoying scene-stealing mania can be.) Even in a gender-bending screwball comedy in which big lug David Czinger spends most of the evening in drag (Rhine maiden braids, plodding steps and balloon breasts), it seems off-key to stick Doyle-Lipe in a male role and have her character trolling for “hot chicks” at Hollywood parties. Doyle-Lipe makes a cute dwarf tourist, sauntering offstage with her head and sunglasses waggling, but Puck isn't the focus of every scene he/she is in, and gofers shouldn’t giggle like maniacs.
Deitrick directs inventively, with Puck making entrances and a final exit in surprising ways. But he needs to demand a more frenetic pace from his cast; in particular, in two scenes with the four Warner Brothers, cues need to be picked up much more quickly.
David Baker's garden-party set for Act Two displayed marble-and-palm-tree elegance — along with the cutest little illuminated Hollywoodland sign on a distant hillside.
In the finale, Ludwig calls for farewells that are supposed to be full of regret but feel unearned. In a similar way, the hijinks of the Civic’s Shakespeare in Hollywood, often very funny, need to bust through their restraints.
[ photo: Jamie Flanery as Max Reinhardt and Anne Mitchell as Lydia in Ken Ludwig's *Shakespeare in Hollywood,* April 2009, Spokane Civic Theater, directed by Wes Deitrick ]
Labels: Ken Ludwig, Shakespeare in Hollywood, Spokane Civic Theatre, Wes Deitrick
