OSF good fun: Cocoanuts and Comedy of Errors

The acting company at Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a supremely talented bunch. We continue to be amazed at how absolutely hilarious they can be. The laugh-meisters had ample opportunity to show their stuff this past season in two outstanding comedies: Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and the Marx Brothers classic The Cocoanuts.

Brent Hinkley, John Tufts, and Mark Bedard as the Marx
Brothers in Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of The
Cocoanuts. OSF photo by Jenny Graham.

The Cocoanuts was adapted by OSF's own Mark Bedard, from the original book by George S. Kaufman and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Bedard even did some extensive sleuthing to turn up some original Berlin tunes that had long been separated from the stage script of the show.

The production, directed by David Ivers, was a reunion of the cast of the Marx's Animal Crackers staged at OSF in 2012, bringing back Bedard as Groucho, Brent Hinkley as Harpo, John Tufts as Chico, and K.T. Vogt as their Margaret Dumont-esque foil.

The show includes a couple of the brothers' best bits: the Why a Duck discussion between Groucho and Chico, and the wild, two-bedroom chase scene featuring the brothers, con-woman Penelope Martin (played by the also-hilarious Kate Mulligan), and the bumbling Detective Hennessey, portrayed by David Kelly, who may well be the most hysterical actor of the group. It has been nearly two months since we saw the show as I write this, and Kelly's rendition of the tune "The Tale of a Shirt" continues to work its way into my head. It is most welcome there.

David Kelly, center, as Detective Hennessey, who really wants
his shirt, with the rest of the cast of The Cocoanuts. OSF
photo by Jenny Graham.

While the story and characters are familiar, there was plenty of ad-libbing and playing off, and in, the audience, from which the brothers swiped a variety of personal items to use in their schtick. At the performance we attended they came away with some gaudy green sunglasses and some snacks. A festival insider tells us that at one performance they lifted a rather intimate toy from the handbag of a teenaged girl in the crowd, yet somehow resisted the urge to make her the butt of jokes.

If not for Water by the Spoonful, this production of The Cocoanuts would have been our choice for best-of-festival. hands down.

The other great comedy of the season was Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, directed by Kent Gash. Instead of Syracuse and Ephesus, the two sets of long-separated twins reside in Harlem and Louisiana at the time of the Harlem renaissance in the late 1920s.

Tobie Windham, left, as Antipholus, and
Rodney Gardiner as Dromio, in OSF's
Production of The Comedy of Errors. OSF
photo by Jenny Graham.

This production featured Rodney Gardiner, who played both Dromios, and Tobie Windham, who portrayed both Antipholuses. (Antipholi?) Tyrone Wilson was marvelous as Egeon, Bakesta King a delight as the Courtesan, and R.J. Foster cut an authoritative figure as Duke Solinus. All were delightful in romping through the twists and turns of mistaken identity, missing necklaces, purloined purses, and the like. Fitting to the era, the music of Harlem swing kept our toes tapping.

The one slight mis-step in The Comedy of Errors came at the end, with the big reveal that the two sets of twins had been reunited. As the same actors played both twins, and did an amazing job at somehow turning up immediately after an exit in a completely different corner of the theater, I'd wondered how Gash would pull this off. He simply introduced two more actors at the end, dressed the same as the other Dromio and Antipholus. I was hoping for something a bit more clever.

That said, this Comedy was also a lot of fun. It's good to mix in some laughs with some of the heavier plays in the festival.

OSF: Two Gents, Tempest

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival produced The Tempest and Two Gentlemen of Verona this year and they were....ok. But we've noticed a bit of a trend. Of the four Shakespeare plays each year (and OSF is dropping down to three next year), one or maybe two of them is great, and the others are just....ok. One shines and the others fizzle. How can that be? Are they economizing with some of the Willy shows on preparing, thinking, creating, and rehearsing time? They wouldn't do that....would they??? Or is it just one of those things?

Dennis Arndt in OSF's The Tempest.

We wouldn't have missed The Tempest, directed by Tony Taccone, out of gratitude to Dennis Arndt for many years of great performances in Seattle (he's an OSF alumnus, but this is our first time seeing him in Ashland). He brought a sensitivity and totally believable pathos to the role of Prospero. However, the production did him no favors. The casual, conversational approach to speaking Shakespeare's lines might have worked well in the black box Thomas Theatre, but didn't quite carry in the Bowmer. 

And nothing about the set helped him out. It started out promising enough, with a dramatic and beautifully set tempest scene. I liked the idea to create an expansive, abstract landscape, and it was a lovely shape, curved up at one corner to be a hill or what have you, and clever traps throughout. But once the clouds and waves magically rolled away, we were left with...wine colored shag carpeting. It didn't exactly transport me, at least not anywhere I wanted to be, and it made the actors seem small. 

The costumes were goofy and sometimes distracting. For example, the magic robe of rope for Prospero seemed to distract him, and us. I was especially annoyed that the Incredible Hulk green-yellow powder (what is that foul stuff??) distracted from an energetic and compelling performance by Wayne T. Carr as Caliban. And while I love meta humor as much as anyone, nods to other work (like Angels in America) seemed out of place in this show.

We saw Two Gents outside in the Elizabethan Theatre, directed by Sarah Rasmussen and cast with all women, and as I mentioned in my Richard III post, the ladies did not entirely nail it. Some of the actors couldn't make themselves clear even with the amplification, and several potentially dramatic moments were swallowed. The Weisenheimer's comment was that the whole production was "beige."

Christiana Clark as Proteus and Sofia Jean Gomez as Valentine
in OSF's Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Here are some highlights, though: Erica Sullivan, supremely skilled and talented, as Julia. Judith-Marie Bergan as Lucetta. Vilma Silva as Antonio. And the whole all-women endeavor was worth it to give K.T. Vogt some meaty stage time as both Launce and the Duke. She has been fantastic in everything we have seen her do here. Kjerstine Rose Anderson also brought the funny as Speed. But, man, Vogt and Anderson had to sweat bullets for every laugh. I don't know if our late September Tuesday night audience was especially soporific or what. Even Picasso, playing Crab, seemed to be half asleep. I think Vogt and Anderson were putting out 60 watts for every candlepower by everybody else at the Lizzie that night. Ladies, I appreciate your labors.

The thing is, Wooden O's Two Gents this summer in the park, directed by David Quicksall, kicked OSF's ass. As did Seattle Shakespeare's Tempest in 2009 with Michael Winters as Prospero, Hana Lass as Ariel, Kerry Ryan as Trinculo, and Peter Dylan O'Connor as Caliban. It's wonderful that we're able to see Shakespeare done well right here in Seattle by the O, Seattle Shakespeare Company and GreenStage. We still love OSF; they've given us a chance to see plays—Shakespeare, other classics, and new work—that we likely wouldn't have had a chance to see otherwise. But it's just a reminder that OSF is not a gimme, and there's some wonderful work being done by small, local companies, presumably on a fraction of OSF's budget.  

OSF: Animal Crackers

I generally think it's not a good idea to try to out-do the legends. As great as Steve Martin is, Peter Sellers is Clouseau, and I refused to see Martin's remake of The Pink Panther. The Gus Van Sant remake of and the Richard Franklin sequel to Psycho both seemed like bad ideas. Did Hitchcock goof up? Heck, I wouldn't even go see the 2003 version of The In-Laws. What, you're going to do it better than Peter Falk and Alan Arkin? Serpentine, Shel! What's next? Keanu Reeves as Charles Foster Kane?

Now, I recognize that aversion to remakes is a little funny for someone who goes to the Shakespeare Festival every year! After all, the Bard only did 37 plays (more or less) and, barring any amazing discoveries in London attics, there won't be any more. So all of the Shakespeare shows are remakes. We've already seen four or five of them more than once just in the eight year's we've been attending. I'm glad people still do Hamlet even though Olivier played the Dane pretty well. Next year OSF is doing A Streetcar Named Desire, and I don't mind seeing another production, (though I pity the poor fools who have to play Stanley with Marlon Brando peeking over their shoulders.)

Anyway, I had mixed feelings when I heard that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was going to produce the Marx Brothers classic Animal Crackers this year. On the one hand, you probably shouldn't mess with Groucho. On the other, the Captain Spaulding role was played by Mark Bedard, one of the flat-out funniest actors among the OSF regulars. On the third hand, the production wasn't really a remake; according to the Playbill it was "reconceived from an adaptation" by Henry Wishcamper.

The show, directed by Allison Narver, did not disappoint. Bedard was fantastic as Groucho, nailing the voice and the look and the walk. He had a bunch of good Groucho gags, but also was nimble in playing off of the audience and ad-libbing. K.T. Vogt, who was hilarious last year in The Imaginary Invalid, was a scream as Mrs. Rittenhouse; Jonathan Haugen was marvelous as both the butler Hives and the art-loving Roscoe W. Chandler.

Two performances came as delightful surprises. John Tufts and Brent Hinkley were featured on the cover of the Playbill in a scene from Henry V. The next night they turned up as Ravelli and The Professor—the Chico and Harpo characters—in Animal Crackers. And talk about trying to out-do a legend! While Groucho was a genius, he's been aped by many an actor. Hinkley did an amazing job taking up the horn of Harpo, who for my money was the most brilliant actor of the brothers, without uttering a word.

Animal Crackers was a lot of fun, and a great exclamation point on our annual trip to OSF. Alas, there are just three performances left; Animal Crackers wraps on Nov. 4. It's playing in the Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland.

OSF: Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella

When I was in college, my boyfriend and I had a date to go to a faculty piano recital. When we told my father where we were going (expecting to impress him for being so grown up and "cultured"), he said "meh" (or whatever the then-equivalent was), to our surprise. He dismissed the recital saying we weren't going to hear anything beautiful, and that it was just going to be artists working out their own technical studies and pet projects and trying to impress each other.

He was right. We left at intermission.

L-R: Miriam A. Laube as Medea, Laura
Griffith as Cinderella, and Jeffrey King as
Macbeth. OSF photo by Jenny Graham.

Which brings us to Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (MMC). This is a project of Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch's that he's been working on and thinking about and staging occasionally since college. It's three productions of three discrete plays staged in an elaborate cut-and-paste ping-pong mash-up of scenes. Think three of your favorite movies playing in split screen at the same time with someone else constantly pushing pause and play and flipping between full screen and split. Yeah. Pretty fucking annoying.

Look, we get it. We really do. The insights, counterpoints, rhythms, and themes (hey look! all three plays have kings in them! look! children are discarded in all three plays! look! women are disappointed by men! look! sisters!); the gender and identity stuff; the homage to theater and its forms, especially "populist" theater (whatever); the challenge to the audience to listen and choose; all of that. We do get it. We got it in the first 20 minutes. (The play lasted 180.)

I don't mind being challenged at the theater, intellectually and emotionally. Indeed, I love it. I'm not just looking for "entertainment" as the word is used when accompanied by a sneer. But I do expect art.

Juxtaposition isn't art.

You have to make something with your materials. I can talk to people whose families taught them to make paella and I can source a lot of really fresh, seasonal, top-notch ingredients and I can carefully season my pan and I can lay out three different recipes for paella side-by-side and maybe do a blog post and a video about what I've learned, all of which may prepare me to come up with inspiring and fascinating possibilities for my very own creative interpretation of paella. But until I cook it up in a pan, it's not good to eat. 

You can put a man and a woman right next to each other but unless they make love, they aren't going to make a baby. Unless they use fertility technology, which sounds like about as much fun as MMC (test tube theater). 

You get the idea.

Nothing was created here. It was smart, clever (too clever by half), technically complicated and brilliantly executed. I can imagine that it was stimulating for the artists involved. But in the end, it was just an intellectual exercise, a technical study, an academic endeavor, produced on a very grand scale. No story was told, no characters were created or developed, and whatever was lovely or moving about it came from the individual plays and the valiant performances of actors trying to act while someone else on stage from a whole different play was talking. (Or singing. Ugh.) 

(For an example of a play that does create something while imaginatively placing canonical plays and characters in new situations, we thoroughly enjoyed The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, directed by Bill Rauch here at OSF in 2008.)

The pity is that we think there were a couple of really fine productions buried in MMC. I would love to see Madea staged. Jeffrey King and Christopher Liam Moore were amazing as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, respectively. Please stage that Macbeth. And while I don't have much interest in Cinderella, I'm looking forward to seeing much more of the actor who played her, Laura Griffith, and godmother K. T. Vogt later this week in Animal Crackers.

But here's my final word: I'm willing to have a clunker now and again (not too often...these tickets are expensive) if it means we also get plays like Party People and The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler and Equivocation. Rauch is bringing OSF into the 21st century and clearly attempting to broaden its audience, and taking some risks to do so. And if this kind of exploration and study and experimentation helps Rauch and all the other artists involved do what they do so well (most of the time), then I'm all for it. But it's kind of like sausage-making. I just don't want to watch it.

MMC plays in the Angus Bowmer Theater at OSF through Nov. 4.