March 03--Most productions of "Twelfth Night" do not contain an interlude wherein the audience throws little balls at the sticky head of an actor, nor are the love-soaked follies of Illyria generally interrupted for an audience-participation conga line. And while I've seen pizzas delivered in the middle of shows before -- Chicago's Neo-Futurists have been ordering out for decades -- the cheese and sausage rarely arrives in the middle of a slice of Shakespeare.
And that is before we even get to the shot glasses, Sir Toby Belch quaffing a can of Bud, or Malvolio rocking out and stripping down to his gilded underwear like an especially Twisted Sister.
As directed by Sean Holmes, the U.K.-based Filter Theatre's touring 90-minute "Twelfth Night" is, then, not so much a full contemporary accounting of the comedy as an offering of cuttings from that venerable Elizabethan amusement, all fused into an interactive, party-like experience. The show, which is not really designed at all, has a water bottle-and-MacBook aesthetic. Most stage managers would be appalled if their rehearsal rooms were left in this kind of state.
If you have a high schooler at home who is bored stiff with the study of this play, here's one opportunity at least to make the case that Shakespeare can be fun and frivolous. I'd also note that there were a few nerdy Shakespeare geeks sitting around me Upstairs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Wednesday night who were so thrilled to be in such irreverent, like-minded company, I was worried their obvious high spirits would entice them into taking a premature polar plunge into Lake Michigan.
I hate to pour on any cold water. And let's stipulate that if you're running a Shakespeare 400 festival of global work, you don't want every show to come with the intensity of the Belarusian's "King Lear." Some funny young Brits make sense.
But.
If you don't know the play, I'm not sure you will follow it from this telling, a restaging of a piece first developed for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's Complete Works Festival in 2006. If you're going to have this level of anarchic and accessible fun with the text, it seems to me that you might pay a bit more attention to the promotion of a narrative arc.
But the main issue here is that the comedy is only sputteringly funny; much of it feels indulgent. You have the sense of a cast inhabiting initially improvised roles created by others, like it's Monday night at Second City.
Although I also liked Sandy Foster, who plays Feste/Maria, the only actress with any palpable emotional investment in the proceedings is Amy Marchant, a very talented young British actress who plays Viola/Sebastian and does so very well indeed. But she's on her own when it comes to the heart. Emotional engagement is not, I recognize, the priority of the evening but "Twelfth Night" is a play about love and love is an emotion. When I last checked, anyway.
There is plenty of funky live music in the show (the fine drummer, Alan Pagan, is in the cast). But, alas, nobody on the stage is what you'd really call a legit singer, so that comes with its own limitations. The show cries out for some killer vocalists, who might sing on as well as play on.
In its best moments, Filter's "Twelfth Night" does have some deconstructed fun with our expectations of how we hear Shakespearean language -- lines in this show are spoken, heard through tiny speakers, delivered by text message, coaxed from the audience and even, believe it or not, incorporated into a shipping forecast. And there is one scene -- between Foster and Marchant -- that starts to play with the sharp contrasts that could add some much needed complexity to these happily carefree proceedings.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
Review: 'Twelfth Night'
2 STARS
When: Through March 13
Where: Chicago Shakespeare Upstairs Theater on Navy Pier
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $48 at 312-595-5600 or chicagoshakes.com
