The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (2000)

I first saw this show produced by a Houston community theater company. The script and staging are wild and goofy, but sitting in the audience really pushes the silliness and belly laughs over the top. I was pleased to learn that this acting trio, as the Reduced Shakespeare Company, wrote the script and performs it all over the English-speaking world. (Yes, “even Vancouver,” as with this live filmed performance.) These guys are better than your average community theater – think of taking the best thespian from 3 different community theater or improvisational comedy troupes and throwing them in with each other. Give them the ugliest wigs and the biggest fake bazoombas you can find, shove them out on stage to gabble and babble so loud and fast that you can barely understand them, knowing that their spills and pratfalls are more Keystone Cops than Cirque du Soleil (but the funniest bit is when a tossed wig lands on the right head, capping a rapid-fire change of characters). No, this is not your father’s Shakespeare, but neither is it your children’s. It is juvenile, with adult humor insinuations. It is full of physical humor and machine-gun soliloquys. It does cover all of Shakespeare’s works (though the sonnets are boiled down to one line, and a number of plays appear only in one long compound title). Most ribald – and Shakespeare was ribald, just highbrow in retrospect – are the kingly plays told as if by a football game announcer, Titus Andronicus as a cooking show, and the half-hour spent on his most famous play wraps up with “Hamlet in 30 seconds,” “Hamlet in 6 seconds,” and then “Hamlet, capsulized and in reverse”! I enjoyed the show, loosey-goosey as it was. Family members of all ages can watch it; care is taken not to scorch the little darlings’ ears. Enjoy! 3 stars. (5-19-2016)