Theater Reviews

Jul 23, 1999 - Falstaff a Surprise Winner in Revamped "Merry Wives"

By By Jack Neal

Adam Witney stars and stars brilliantly as Falstaff in the Renaissance Projects adaptation of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor." The play, which opens tomorrow night (7/29/99) in Wingfield Park as part of the Uptown Downtown ARTown festival, is surprisingly good, an excellent production of Shakespeare's sprawling, repetitious mishmash which in any hands but Shakespeare's would barely be playable.

"Merry Wives" prefigures the conventional themes of later Restoration comedies: money, love, inheritances and infidelity, male and female. If legend is true that Queen Elizabeth asked to see Sir John Falstaff in love, it is a love of the merry wives' husbands' money that sends Falstaff wooing, and a belief in the wives' feigned lust for him that trips him not once, but three times into bombastic comeuppances.

Director Nathan Walker (who also did this adaptation) helps craft Witney (the actor surely helps craft himself) into the most wonderfully buffooneristic Falstaff I've seen. In a go-for-broke performance, Witney redefines madcappery with uncanny comedic timing. His Falstaff is a deliciously choreographed character of silly actions and sillier reactions that comes off as inspired insanity. Witney makes the show worth seeing. The equally as good news is - he's not alone.

It's Mistress Ford (June Hartmann) who invites Falstaff to trysts thwarted by her jealous husband's untimely arrivals, while Mistress Page (Mary Bennett) lectures the audience with feminist defenses of her sex. Both Hartmann and Bennett accrue gobs of comedic mileage as they play the play's men for fools - Falstaff most deservedly of all.

Meanwhile, as "Merry Wives'" young lovers, Anne Page and Fenton, Sarah Cook and Jason Nash, respectively, are charmingly fresh. Alas, Miss Cook is very much more. Since the play has been reset in a Chicago of the Roaring Twenty's period, some of the best songs of that era - "Someone to Watch Over Me," "April Showers," "Summertime" (among many) - are sung by Cook in a pure, crystalline soprano and unaffected phrasing that makes all she sings thoroughly captivating.

But who, as if we didn't know, will marry Anne Page and inherit her money, when she turns 17? Will it be Fenton, who loves her for herself and not her money? Or will it be the strange Dr. Caius (Jamie Woodham), who loves Anne for her dowry and not herself? Add to the play's already mess of characters some of Falstaff's buddies from "Henry IV" and "Henry V" - pistol the brawler (also, Miss Woodham), Justice Shallow the schemer (Ariel Mermin) and the meddlesome Mistress Quickly, to name but a few - and the viewer has a confusion of a play that gallops off in all directions. But what fun these characters are and how generally well played they are, too.

Pamela Martin, purring through her role as Mistress Quickly with a thick Irish brogue, is as quick witted in handing out advice as she's adept at spewing the Bard's delirious volleys of words. Brett Andres was excellent as Frank Ford, Mistress Ford's angry and right-to-be jealous husband. Also worthy of mention are LaRonda Etheridge (Father Hugh Evans), the young William Shakespeare (Alexander Biber) and Jeremy Zutter (George Page), although I found Mr. Zutter's delivery of lines often difficult to understand

Tiffany Mayes, Shadow, stands in the background as a keen observer of the play's convoluted plots. Mayes, who moves with a cat-like shrewdness, not only does her own observing but leads the cast through a series of stop-action moves that blends the action with knowing apprehensions from scene to scene. The music of Gershwin is used to good effect (and exclusively) in these scene-joining interludes, and is nicely cut and spliced together by Jackie Maye. The production has a look of the '20s - flapper dresses, black tuxedoes and bowler hats - that, with a colored feathered boa here, and a colored feather in a headband there, gives each scene an individualized look that becomes fun to anticipate. Thanks for that fun and those '20's good looks goes to Amy Brown, the company's costume mistress. Thanks also to the technical direction of Neil Loveland, all the play's pieces come together without a hitch.

Walker's direction gets a wide variety of physical inventiveness from a cast that has the good sense (and good direction) to know when to take center stage and when to defer to others. Walker's direction is crisp and his adaptaion picks up the play's pace considerably, although the excising of another half hour from the play's running time (it clocks in at two-and-a-half hours) would make his "Merry Wives," for my money (which, of course, no one pays including me because it's free), just that much more fun. This "Merry Wives of Windsor" is, nonetheless, an exceedingly worthwhile production of one of Shakespeare's lesser plays. Veteran actress and Renaissance Projects founder Mary Bennett produces and deserves credit for much of the show's success. Stage manager Joel Lippart and production intern Goddess Heather Weyrick have the unenviable task, which they manage handsomely, of keeping all things glued together and running like clockwork.

"Merry Wives" plays Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights (7/29-31/99) at 8 in Wingfield Park . There is no admission charge. For other Renaissance Projects presentations and events call 775 348 6279.