The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (abridged) simply refuses to die. So many have tried to kill it in the past, but it keeps coming back again and again and again and again. Local groups who have staged the comedy have included The Milwaukee Rep and Soulstice Theatre. Gretchen Mahkorn was quite charming in a staging of the comedy as one of The World’s Stage’s first productions. I’m sure there have been more in the past few years that I can’t quite remember.
The latest group to bring it to the stage is Milwaukee Chamber Theatre which brings some promising comic talent to the stage. Four men attempt to stage everything Shakespeare ever wrote onstage in a single, easy to digest performance. Chris Klopatek, Rick Pendzich, Chase Stoeger and Marcus Truschinski take the stage inthe production. By a staggering coincidence, not just one but all four in the cast are UW-Whitewater alumni (weird.)
Rick Pendzich has shown ample talent in musical comedy—a skill which will aid him quite well in a production which attempts to roll through 37 plays (and more) in 99 minutes. (With intermission, that’s actually two hours or so.) There’s also quite a bit of Shakespearian experience in the cast. I seem to remember Stoeger and Truschinski putting in really impressive performances in various Shakespeare shows over the years.
The show is being directed by Ray Jivoff, who has exceptional experience in comedy both onstage and off. This is a huge relief as nothing kills this kind of comedy quite like misguided direction. A show like this needs to feel dangerous and extemporaneous even though countless rehearsals have pounded it into a bloody, heaving corpse of a thing devoid of any joy. (Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating, but the point is that the thing really needs to feel fresh even though the comedy here has a long and distinguished history of attempting to be funny. The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (abridged) can be funny and it will be funny with this cast and this director. I guess that’s what I’m saying here. These guys know what they’re doing. We can trust them.)
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Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s staging of The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (abridged) runs Nov. 19 - Dec. 14 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.
