This Spring of Love
Treating Shakespeare as a high school musical comedy leads to much fun at City Theatre
Reviewed by Barry Pineo, Fri., April 29, 2011
This Spring of Love
City Theatre, 3803-D Airport, 524-2870
Through May 9
Running time: 2 hr., 45 min.
To love or not to love; that is the question. And the answer almost always is the former, as anyone familiar with Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona or American musical comedies can attest. In This Spring of Love, adapter Andy Berkovsky and director Jeff Hinkle mix the Bard's Two Gents with songs, turning the play into a kind of faux chamber musical. While the music is culled from various sources, many of the songs contain original lyrics (most by Berkovsky) based on the play, which follows the pro-love Proteus and the anti-love Valentine as each falls for the sublime Sylvia, with Proteus' former love, Julia, disguising herself as a man and traveling from Verona to Milan in search of her lost love.
There's much fun to be had at this City Theatre Company production. Berkovsky uses a lot of Shakespeare's text and adds more to it than just the songs. There's a character named Eros (played sharply by R. Michael Clinkscales) that you won't find in the original script, who narrates the action and provides assists as various characters throughout. The actors freely augment the story with bits of other Shakespearean plays as well as modern colloquialisms. Berkovsky has a very gay take on Shakespeare's play, and his adapted script supports the idea. The actors as a group rely heavily on the sexuality inherent in Shakespeare's original, and Berkovsky has turned one of the main characters into a cross-dresser, which works beautifully both in the context of the play as it's been given to us – with a woman pretending to be a man – and in the context of the play as it was originally presented – with men playing all the roles, including the female roles. Mix in the songs, every one of which is seemingly about relations between the sexes, and you've got an evening full of musical comedy love.
More often than not, it all works because the actors have so much fun playing Shakespeare as though it were a high school musical (which this kind of feels like, mostly in a very good way). Generally speaking, the supporting cast steals the show. Michelle Alexander as Julia's maid, Lucetta, executes the patter song "A Woman's Reason" almost perfectly and shakes the foundations of love with "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." As the highbrow Duchess of Milan and mother of Sylvia, Ashley Edwards vamps it to the hilt in "Feeling Good." Nelson Flores consistently amuses with his street take on the role of rival suitor Thurio, and Kirk Kelso as Proteus' father, Antonio, provides a great surprise in "Amor" when he reveals – well, I don't want to give too much away. Gonna have to see the show for that one.
It's always fun to see a live animal onstage, and you get that here as well with the bulldog Opie of Bullrun in the role of the gaseous Crab. (Yes, Shakespeare did fart jokes, so there is actually hope for the likes of Judd Apatow.) Should you attend, you also might get to see something that you don't often see practically anywhere in Austin live theatre – some truly painful moments. But it wouldn't be a faux Shakespearean high school chamber musical comedy without a couple of those, would it?
