Cedar City • All in. That’s the spirit of the three terrific actors who craft comedy magic before our eyes in “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged).”
The play’s a contemporary Monty Pythonesque romp that throws everything and the kitchen sink into a Shakespearean witch’s brew. Even the canon completists among us don’t need to worry: Theatrical quips are tossed out so quickly that you don’t need to check any boxes. Just hang on for the next wig change.
Under the sure-handed direction of Christopher Edwards, actors Riley Shanahan, Marco Antonio Vega and Luke Striffler play together like long-lost comic brothers in this entertaining Utah Shakespeare Festival production, a regional premiere.
The main conceit of ”Long Lost” is that you’re being ushered through Shakespeare-land via a Disney storyboard. Ingredients in the comedic mincemeat include revenge plots, mistaken identities and twins dressed as LDS missionaries. Cross-dressed characters frolic along with ghosts, witches and fairies, all thrown together by tempest-scaled winds.
“Long Lost” comes from the Reduced Shakespeare Company, the wits behind “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).” This show follows the same brand of highbrow/lowbrow improvisational zaniness. The action is lightning-quick, bawdy, irreverent, good-hearted and, most of all, just plain nuts. No joke is too lame, no pun spurned.
The cheeky frame story suggests that when the remains of Richard III were found beneath a British parking lot in 2012, another part of the buried treasure was a first draft of Shakespeare’s works.
This dramatic work hasn’t been performed because, well, it would run more than 100 hours long. And so, the story goes, these three actor friends have condensed the story in order to stage it for the first time.
This is Shakespeare’s early, less mature stuff, and all of his plots are mashed together by an ongoing feud between Puck (from “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”) and Ariel (from “The Tempest”). Vega’s Puck conveys a fluid hip-hop attitude under a backward baseball cap adorned with red Satanic horns. In contrast, Striffler’s Ariel has an impish Disney Princess charm, underscored by the character’s red wig and a purple conch-shell bra.
Shanahan wrings arch pleasure from some of the canon’s most famous speeches, from the Chorus’ Muse of Fire, referring to the cardboard O of the set, to Juliet’s balcony speech. In a particularly brilliant bit of physical comedy, he plays Richard III as he loses his hunchback and then, with another crack, gets it back again.
Think of Mistress Quickly and Sir John Falstaff as history’s “first rhyming couplet,” or jokes about Lear’s daughters, mistakenly referred to as Gonorrhea, Syphilis and Chlamydia. Think of Beatrice as Beyoncé, who flips her hair and takes selfies as she, like a few famous Kates, puts men in their place.
Everything is quick-witted, from costumes, wigs and props to lighting magic and sound tricks. Suffice it to say, the fun of just about every scene is realizing there’s no way to track exactly how we got here.
Be prepared: The show includes water pistols and flying baby dolls and several civilians being pulled into the action. And on the night I attended, theatergoers of all ages were laughing their collective heads off.
”William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged)”<br>Zany regional premiere offers a comedic showcase for three improvisationally fueled actors — and enthusiastic theatergoers — who appear to be having the time of their stage lives.<br>Where • Anes Studio Theatre, 101 W. University Blvd., Cedar City<br>When • Reviewed Aug. 29; plays through Oct. 21<br>Tickets • $50-$54 at 1-800-PLAYTIX or bard.org/tickets<br>Running time • Two hours, including a 15-minute intermission
