Thursday Night on the Lower East Side: The Drilling Company presents "The Merry Wives of Windsor (Towers)" at Shakespeare in the Parking Lot on Ludlow and Broome Streets

Tonight we were lucky enough to attend the opening of The Drilling Company's new season of Shakespeare in the Parking Lot and the premiere of The Merry Wives of Windsor Towers, a raucous and uproarious version of the farcical comedy featuring Falstaff, here set in a Lower East Side condo. Directed by Hamilton Clancy, the production provided lots of laughs and proved as entertaining as the previous performances we've seen at the municipal parking lot at Broome and Ludlow Streets.

We'd been to the two shows of the 2010 Shakespeare in the Parking Lot season - Love's Labour's Lost and Julius Caesar - and they always seem to do fine work in what's an odd setting, with the space provided by the city Department of Transportation and lighting, once it's dark enough to be needed, provided by Con Edison (in the form of lampposts).

Unlike a park, the working parking lot at Ludlow and Broome is in the middle of a very busy, often noisy dynamic neighborhood - but the ambient sounds (sirens, nearby loud music, passersby conversing in several languages - are easily tuned out, and the actors' voices manage to carry over them, their line readings pretty faultless and in some cases brilliant.

Like the version called The Merry Wives of Windsor Terrace that Brave New World Repertory presented last summer in a Brooklyn playground, director Hamilton Clancy - as he did the Julius Caesar presented with the title character a Bloombergesque tyrant (perhaps a benevolent one), the conspirators aggrieved civil servants and civic leaders - The Merry Wives of Windsor Towers is set in the present, with substituted New York references: the Hudson River replacing the Thames, the Fat Woman of Brentford becoming the Fat Woman of Bay Ridge, and so on.

Shakespeare in the Parking Lot has perhaps a more current New York "feel" than any of the summer outdoor theater companies. Their last production of Merry Wives back in 2001, was set on the Upper East Side, and it's a measure of the changes in the city that the tony home of the Pages and Fords and their friends can now be relocated a lot further south.

In a lot of ways, Merry Wives is one of Shakespeare's more convoluted comedies, akin to a very complex and sophisticated sitcom; we heard one adult before the performance asking some young ones (perhaps students?) if they'd read the summary beforehand to make the many characters and plot devices easier to comprehend. It's actually not that hard if the performers are adept enough, as they are here, and even a slightly clueless young (or old) audience member just concentrating on the broad physical and easily understandable verbal humor. There's a lot of plain silliness here, not to mention some broad stereotypes, and it all seems to work nearly without a flaw.

Presented without an intermission, as always (we're told to use the bathroom at McDonald's or Starbucks on Delancey Street if we need to; we managed to control our BPH and now live just one J or M train stop away, luckily), the play moved very quickly, the time melting as the many characters went through their comic conspiracies, with lots of laughs (one point was probably the most we've ever laughed continuously at any Shakespeare play we'd ever seen, on film or on stage) moving things along.

The talented ensemble included a very funny, if hapless Dave Marantz as Falstaff, Karla Hendrick as Mistress Ford, Victoria Campbell as Mistress Page, Veronica Cruz as Mistress Quickly, Amanda Dillard as Ann Page, Jean Marc Russ as Master Page, Bill Green as Robert Shallow, Andrew Markert as Hugh Evans, Sajeev Pillai as The Host of the Garter, Grant Turnbull as Master Slender, Shane Mitchell is Master Fenton, Drew Valins as Dr. Caius and Alessandro Colla as Pistol.

Other featured actors include Michael Gnat, Leal Vona (whose Shakespeare work with Smith Street Stage we've admired), Thoe Maltz and Hailey Simmonds. Due to illness, someone (we didn't catch her name) stepped in at the last moment as Simple tonight, and she was so fine that we were totally oblivious to her subbing at short notice. All the actors were fine, but we especially admired Sajeev Pillai, Drew Valins, Andrew Markert, Alessandro Colla, and whoever played Master Ford - probably because we're a sucker for politically incorrect exaggerated ethnic accents.

And as the "merry wives," Victoria Campbell and Karla Hendrick were delicious as any Real Housewives you seen on cable TV. And two actors we recall well from the other productions we saw here -- Amanda Dillard (from Love's Labour's Lost) as a sexy but sensible Ann Page, and Bill Green (from Julius Caesar) as an amiable, distracted Justice Shallow -- also gave fine performances.

The scenic design - including very clever and effective little doors in the skyline backdrop reminiscent of joke time in TV's classic Laugh-In -- was by Jennifer Varbalow, and Lisa Renee Jordan shrewdly designed the costumes.  And Clancy Hamilton, artistic director of The Drilling Company, has once again managed to direct a Shakespeare in the Parking Lot production that should keep audiences coming down to the Lower East Side.  The Merry Wives runs on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights starting at 8 p.m. until July 28.  Check it out and the world will be your oyster.

Saturday Night on the Lower East Side: The Drilling Company presents "Julius Caesar" at Shakespeare in the Parking Lot on Ludlow and Broome Streets

Tonight we were lucky enough to be at (and to get a seat at) the Drilling Company's final performance of its summer 2010 season to see its acclaimed and very popular production of Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot.

We're amateur bloggers, not professional theater reviewers, and we view what we do here (our hobby) as reports (filled with irrelevant personal meanderings), definitely not reviews. This production has already been reviewed by critic Anita Gates in the New York Times, by David Sheward in Backstage, by August Schulenberg at NYTheatre.com, and probably elsewhere. We're loath to pretend that we're anything more than we are, just some cheap old guy who likes to go to free summer events in New York and who can't take a decent pic to save his life.

We liked this version of the play a lot, and so, it appeared, did most of the overflow crowd who quickly took up all the seats and then crammed around standing for over two hours. We've already seen a good Julius Caesar by EBE Ensemble in Prospect Park this summer, and wrote about our feelings about the play since first reading it in 1965.

We think director Hamilton Clancy, who played the title role, and his actors got to an aspect of the political drama that we hadn't seen touched on in quite the same way before. We also thought the reviewers underrated some of the performers: yeah, the blazing standouts were the two women in the two principal (pun not intended) roles, Selene Beretta as Cassius and the spellbinding Ivory Aquino as Marc Antony, who rethinks the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech into something readymade for YouTube.

But there were also other good performances, and none of them were ever less than good. Also, it seemed to us that this play worked (and maybe this is our own senile imagining) as social satire and in particular as a devastating critique of the anti-teacher tenure of the current New York City Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, and his even more corporate-minded patron Mayor Bloomberg - as well as of the similar-minded CUNY Chancellor Michael Goldstein and D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and probably other efficiency-minded, business-oriented big city school superintendants.

"Chancellor" and "Caesar" have a similar ring and doth become the mouth as well. And that is the genius of director Clancy's now well-known transposition of the intrigue of ancient Rome to a contemporary school board (unmistakeably New York's: in probably the most underrated performance, Bill Green as a rumpled Casca with a yardstick and safety scissors as his weapons, his tucked-in tie, little mustache and probable toupee, is an archetype of the weary, now-incompetent bureaucrat left over from the Lindsay administration in practically every city agency).

That makes Mark Jeter's world-weary, hamishe Brutus the well-meaning union leader who's risen from the ranks of some high school's social studies department and Beretta's Cassius the firebrand gadfly who makes every meeting at least half an hour longer with her wild but on-target bitter criticism; you know she's as correct in seeing the big picture as she is an annoying blowhard.

Put school system stalwarts like these - parents, teachers, administrators - in a situation where the crown is handed over to someone who's conquered the corporate world, dominating it like a rich-guy colossus (Caesar), and his party-girl aide with a bottom-line mentality , the heart of a corporate shark and the ability to manipulate the media and thus the crowd (Antony) - and you get a recipe for assassination and chaos.

There are just wonderful touches throughout this, from the typical New York placard-wielding demonstrators, the garment-center dressmaker's dummy (representing the empty-headedness of Caesar's administration) and Steven Lee Edwards's funny and satirical campaign and country songs to the many little bits of business which make this a very New York-centric political thriller, and so it seems perfectly natural that the actors may be drowned out sporadically by police sirens, idling buses, boom boxes, and the occasional passing homeless nutjob.

Most of all, for us, it was the performance of the cast, even in minor roles - such as Amanda C. Fuller as a variety of Manhattan street tropes, Jared Benn as the guy in love with bullet points, Jordan Feltner as what passes for the hip guy among big-city schoolteachers, Jared Benn as the disgruntled clown from Middle Village: all people you can see every day on the Q train. (Caesar and Antony go by limousine, and Calpurnia [a moving Leila Okafor] hasn't left her Park Avenue five-bedroom apartment in years.) And they're all going to be losers in a world where young clueless yuppies (Marianna Caldwell as a callow Octavius) are now in charge.

We were really tired tonight and sort of had to drag ourselves to the parking lot at Broome and Ludlow (luckily it's close to Williamsburg), but we're enormously glad we got to see the Drilling Company's Julius Caesar on the final night. The Ides of next July will eventually come, and since it's a Friday night, there'll be free Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.