Playhouse on Park is the "Cheese to My Macaroni"!

On Friday evening, the family and I attended Playhouse on Park's production of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged), a very entertaining three-man show with Sean Harris, David Salsa, and Rich Hollman, directed by Tom Ridgely.

The packed house (BTW, erroneously called the first-ever sold-out show at POP) enjoyed the manic energy of the three actors and their remarkable ability to switch roles -- and gears -- at the drop of a hat (or of a line or of a costume or of a prop)!

Whether a devotee of the Bard or a novice, one can't help but enjoy oneself because, even in the midst of the silliest of spoofs, the actors are able to make the language and characters come alive. (Even the apparent throw-away soliloquy of Hamlet, as beautifully performed by Mr. Hollman, spoke volumes of reasons why Shakespeare will not -- indeed, cannot-- go away.)

The show is so fast-paced I really can't remember everything I found really, really funny. I know I can't recall the last Uncle Vanya joke I was exposed to, and admittedly I didn't really fully get the allusion last night, but I laughed, and laughed heartily... so it needn't matter.

As I told my daughters, the strength of a show like this is that, despite its mockery of scholarly approaches to the playwright and the plays, the authors (Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Borgeson) had to be masters of the Shakespearean corpus to create such a work. So genuinely funny a play can't be written by those who don't know and love "my Willy."

From my perspective , this is the most completely successful production that POP has yet mounted, and that's not an easy mark to hit (given what they have done even in their short existence)!

FYI: The title of this post alludes to one of the Hamlet bits that got the entire audience playing along. And, if that doesn't define good theatre, I'm not sure what does!