It isn’t cerebral, just funny

The wild, raucous parody “The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)” requires one thing above all: three cast members who are high-energy, lovable and just plain funny.

For the Spokane Civic Theatre’s summer show, the verdict is bingo, bingo and bingo.

This purposely goofy comedy has a hit-and-miss script, a lot like improv comedy itself. Some bits work, others fall relatively flat.

Yet with Stuart McKenzie, Ron Ford and Paul Villabrille, even the relatively nonfunny parts have their charm. These three guys are like the Three Amigos, the Three Musketeers and the Three Stooges rolled into one.

Ford is the stocky one who communes with poor Yorick; Villabrille is the young, brash one whose scream can set off car alarms; and McKenzie is the skinny mensch who is trying to hold the whole circus together.

Director Wes Deitrick obviously did a good job of enabling these guys to pour forth a sense of controlled chaos.

Not that the material is always necessary brilliant, or sometimes even passable. The conceit is that these three guys have come up with a plan to present all of Shakespeare in quick, accessible form, all in one evening.

Of course, they have to weasel out of this somehow, since Shakespeare wrote about 26 plays and a raft of sonnets. So they combine all of the comedy plays into one plot, involving various dukes and servants and mistake identities, ending in “four weddings and a fairy.”

The core of the show consists of extended renditions of two of Shakespeare’s best known plays. In the first act, we get an insane version of “Romeo and Juliet,” with such mangled lines as “A nose by any other name would … smell.”

The entire second act consists of “Hamlet,” done four different ways: quick, even quicker, really quick, and then backwards.

This all provides plenty of opportunity for the actors to engage in various shtick. For instance, when Ophelia drowns, Villabrille in crazy blonde wig throws a glass of water in his own face, falls down, and squirts water straight up from his mouth.

It also provides plenty of audience participation. One woman was dragged up on stage to play Ophelia, and the rest of the audience played her id, ego and super-ego by waving their arms and shouting things like “Get thee to a nunnery.” It was tough to pull off on the Civic’s more formal Main Stage, but the actors made it work.

Now, a couple of caveats. The humor can be a little juvenile at times. One running gag has Villabrille pretending to vomit on the front row. Other bits, like “Titus Andronicus” done as a bloody cooking show, are crude one-joke sketches that go on too long.

So, please don’t go expecting high-brow entertainment.

However there is some real art being performed here, the art of comedy. And sometimes, as when Villabrille delivers the “what a piece of work is man” speech, it even borders on profundity – until someone breaks the spell and does a scene with sock puppets.