Tuesday Night in Waterside Plaza: Curious Frog Theatre Company presents "Two Gentlemen of Verona" at the Plaza

We've just come back from seeing another entertaining Shakespeare production by the excellent Curious Frog Theatre Company: their sparkling, sexy, slimmed-down 1980s version of Two Gentlemen of Verona,

played outdoors tonight at the Waterside Plaza apartment complex overlooking the East River.

This was the fifth time we'd seen the Curious Frog troupe, but we'd never been to Waterside Plaza before, despite working for years just a few blocks away. Their outdoor plaza, open to the public, isn't an ideal setting although it has a raised stage; the cast had to compete with noisy generators and helicopters taking off.

Yet the actors still managed to convey the truly curious mixture of light-as-air comedy and bizarre betrayals that make up what is generally thought to be Shakespeare's first dramatic effort and one of his lesser comedies. Their line readings were generally fine (even when the nimble puns are nearly incomprehensible to the average contemporary theatergoer), and some of the physical comedy was among the best we've seen in outdoor Shakespeare.

A particular standout in the small cast of eight (Two Gentlemen has the fewest characters of any Shakespeare play, and you can tell it's a fledgling effort by the way he can't deftly handle dialogue between any more than three characters at a time) was a zany Krystine Summers in the comedy's most crowd-pleasing role as the servant Launce, who with his flea-bitten dog Crab (played here by a lovably worn orangey stuffed animal), made us laugh more than anyone did this entire summer.

She was indeed funnier than the only other Launce we've seen: the great actor Dylan Baker, playing against type in the Central Park New York Shakespeare Festival 1987 production. (Hey, that was actually in the 1980s.) Two Gentlemen of Verona can be very funny, as here, and it also prefigures some of the themes of love and loyalty that Shakespeare will develop in a more mature way in his later comedies (and his Verona-set play, Romeo and Juliet).

The story is relatively simple: Proteus and Valentine are two gentlemen of Verona. Proteus initially loves Julia and Valentine falls in love with Sylvia. But then Proteus falls for Sylvia too. All repair to a forest, where Julia is disguised as a boy. And as in other Shakespeare comedies, love finds its way in a remote setting when a heroine disguises herself a male. But Proteus's betrayal of his BFF Valentine and his beloved Julia just upon seeing the lovely Sylvia always seems highly problematic.

Here all is played with extremely fluffy comedy: when Proteus (played with eye-popping unstable energy by Emilio Aquino, whose innate decency somehow manages to transcend the character's uglier side) first sets eyes on Julia, the action goes into slo-mo as heart-stopping music blares. That makes it easier to try not to think about the implications of his treachery and selfishness, and Valentine's end-of-play turn-on-a-dime forgiveness of his buddy, whom he's just seen attempting to sexually assault his girlfriend.

Apart from Krystine Summers and Emilio Aquino, we saw top-notch work from all the actors in this production, directed by Reneé Rodriguez (who also directed the Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream: the Scavengers we liked so much in the past two summers; she also played Cassius in the company's Julius Caesar we saw a week ago in Fort Greene Park).

In the other comic servant role, Robert J. Dyckman (who directed Julius Caesar) has leahter-jacketed wise-guy aplomb as Speed; he seems more Corona than Verona, and it works.

Angela Sharp, whom we thought excellent as Calpurnia a week ago, here portrays Julia as a ditzy but resourceful riot grrrl, matched in effervescence by her confidante/maid Lucetta (Umi Shakti), who's constantly egging her on. Julia's scenes with Proteus give off both light and heat as early on, they pretty much can't keep their hands off one another.

As the play's nominal hero, the noble Valentine, Justin Maruri matched the exuberance of his friend and rival Proteus, but also exuded sweetness and earnestness in his both his heterosexual passion and his commitment to the bromance with the other gentleman of Verona.

James Ware, authoritative last week as Julius Caesar, brought some gravitas to the play's most mature (in every sense) characters, Proteus's father, the decisive but casual Antonio, and Sylvia's father, the stuffy, formal but clever Duke of Milan.

And as the golden uptown girl of Milan, Bushra Laskar was alternatively ardent, flighty, and petulant -- she makes Sylvia worth fighting for even if the song "Who is Sylvia?" doesn't quite have a definitive answer.

The cast wore variously funky, comfy and stylish Eighties fashions thanks to the costume design by Samantha Guinan, and the dialogue was nicely highlighted by the background music featuring a blaring playlist of some of the decade's better songs.

The action romped back and forth a couple of times from the stage on the north side of the plaza to a strip of grass on the south side, representing the forest to where Valentine is exiled and joins the outlaws (played by Dyckman, Shakti, and Summers) following a highly stylized and comic fight scene (directed by Rocio Alexis Mendez).

This back-and-forth entailed moving the audience, mostly Waterside residents with lots of older folks as well as little kids (some scooted around during the performance), and while we didn't mind one bit, a few people obviously had trouble literally following the action.

We would have preferred to see this production in daylight (the company will be doing Julius Caesar here at 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 10), and there were some problems catching the lines due to sporadic noise, but night lent the convoluted hijinks touches of whimsy and insouciance, as befits this lightweight, frothy comedy, fittingly set in a lightweight, frothy decade.

We're grateful for Curious Frog Theatre Company's presenting Two Gentlemen this summer in such a festive, colorful package.

Tuesday Night in Fort Greene: Curious Frog Theatre Company presents "Julius Caesar" in Fort Greene Park

Tonight we were in the leafy expanse of Fort Greene Park to see an engrossing, thoughtful production of Julius Caesar -- with the most incredibly intense fight scenes we've seen in a long time -- by the Curious Frog Theatre Company, whose work we've admired for years.

We've written before about how Julius Caesar has been one of our favorite Shakespeare plays since we first read it more than 46 years ago -- we know a lot of the play by heart -- and we never get tired of seeing productions, even though we've seen several just in the past couple of years.

It was a gorgeous night, and the performance took place on the hilly meadow by the north side of Fort Greene Park, near Myrtle Avenue, surrounded by the huge trees.

The 149-foot granite Doric column over the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument crypt served as a wonderfully apt backdrop to this play of intrigue set in ancient Rome.

The play also resonated with us seeing it on the day rebels overwhelmed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, with no one sure what the outcome will be of this strike against a charismatic tyrant whose supporters in Tripoli remain angrily defiant.

Yeah, Julius Caesar is definitely still relevant, and the Curious Frog production made that evident. Director Robert J. Dyckman moves things along efficiently, if not bloodlessly. But the full passions, apart from the scenes with the worried Roman wives Portia (Kimberley Wong)

and Calpurnia (Angela Sharp) -- the only female characters, although this production's ethnically diverse cast of seven men and seven women all play roles without regard to gender, which works so well it seems unremarkable -- don't really start to appear until after the assassination.

Then the momentum of the drama, and the passions of the street mobs and the individual leaders, move things with an irresistible momentum to the spectacular long and violent fight scenes (kudos to fight director Rocio Mendez) -- with both men and women going at it with a ferocity that's actually scary -- and the final military battles and the deaths of the major conspirators.

Set in the traditional 44 B.C.E. with Roman garb, the play nevertheless seems timeless. (To us, this play's traditional costumes somehow always come off as more contemporary than Shakespeare played in Elizabethan costumes.)

James Ware is a strong Julius Caesar, perhaps rasher and more in command than others we've seen (in the classic film version, Louis Calhern plays him as a kind of doddering old leader), and Nicholas Urda as Brutus conveys intelligence and wariness.

That wariness is especially directed at Cassius, played here by Reneé Rodriguez (director of some of the previous Curious Frog productions we've enjoyed) with an almost sneering skepticism about everything except her own ideas. Director Robert J. Dyckman delivers an effective funeral oration as Mark Antony, though at times Antony's cynicism is only slightly less hidden than Cassius'.

As seems customary with the productions of Julius Caesar we've seen onstage, most of the cast takes on multiple roles, with nearly all the actors except the major characters being members of the mobs of commoners and crowds of Roman citizens as well as the fierce soldiers in battle in the Acts IV and V scenes.

They included Emilio Aquino as Decius Brutus and an assured Octavius); Angela Sharp (Calpurnia/Popilius/Messala​/2nd Commoner); Krystine Summers in the roles of stolid characters like Casca, Lepidus, and Strato as well as a Commoner-Musician
Kimberley Wong (Portia/Soothsayer/Pindarus​/Citizen 2) and Manuel de la Portilla, who's all over the place and seems to be more than one person playing Marullus, Brutus' boy servant Lucius, Caesar’s servant, the senators Cicero and Publius, the soldier Cato and a citizen -- whew!).

Additional excellent cast members, performing with equal energy, were Al Patrick Jo, who made a very good Metellus Cimber as well as Lucillius and Citizen 3); D. Ajane Carlton (Flavius/Artemidorus/Soldie​r 2/Citizen 4); Shae Orrick, playing Trebonius and Volumnius; Holly Dortch as Cinna and Titinius; and Kevin Russo (Caius Ligarius/Octavius’ Servant/Soldier 1).

We were impressed by the minimalist set, which worked fine in this setting, and since Curious Frog Theatre Company is taking this Julius Caesar, as well as Two Gentlemen of Verona, to a dozen parks and other venues in four boroughs, it's obviously necessary.

As darkness descended over Fort Greene Park and this excellent production ended, after depositing our usual donation into, here, a Roman warrior's shield, we walked along to through the park, thinking about, among the many lines we've learned by heart since ninth grade, these, immediately after Caesar's assassination: "How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!" And when we got home, we looked to the New York Times website to see the news from Tripoli.

We're grateful we got to see the Curious Frog Theatre Company do their thing tonight. If you can attend one of the eleven remaining performances of their 2011 summer season, you'll probably be grateful, too.

Saturday Afternoon in Fort Greene: Curious Frog Theatre Company presents "A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Scavengers" at Fort Greene Park

The first outdoor production of Shakespeare we ever saw was as a teenager forty years ago - on Thursday evening, July 23, 1970, to be exact (this is why you should keep a diary too) - when BACA Repertory presented A Midsummer Night's Dream in Prospect Park at Wollman Rink.

You'd think after seeing so many stagings of Dream over the years - just last year, by the Continuum Company in Von King Park in Bed-Stuy and by Hudson Warehouse in Riverside Park, and the year before, by the Piper Theatre in Park Slope's Washington Park - we'd be jaded or bored by now, especially since in the past week alone we've already seen five Shakespeare plays in Brooklyn parks.

But we can honestly say that today we were still just as excited and wide-eyed as ever as we watched Curious Frog Theatre Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Scavengers late this afternoon on a grassy hill looking toward the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park.

Directed by Reneé Rodriguez, whose Romeo and Juliet we admired last summer, this Dream is special in a lot of ways, more impressive for the fact that we've already seen more than a dozen productions of the comedy over the years.

This staging, set within the frame of a fraternity/sorority scavenger hunt with a cast of bright-eyed, enthusiastic, charming and rowdy actors

who appeared young enough to be undergrads, was fast-paced, action-packed (the fight scenes were the longest, toughest and best we've ever seen in a Shakespeare comedy), and funny presentation.

The fairies in the play are still real fairies, but the mechanicals ineptly putting on the play-within-the-play, "Pyramus and Thisbe," are members of the college support staff: Bottom seems to be a low-level assistant coach, and others are workers from the cafeteria, custodial staff, secretarial pool or security guards.

It's a nice conceit, and the concept of the scavenger hunt, while giving Shakespeare's text primacy, nicely envelopes the comedy in a hectic but fun competition; every once in a while, contestants - a boy and girl paired with matching-color T-shirts with insignias of their three-Greek-letter affiliations - runs by in the background, hunting their next item.

And why not Greek? Shakespeare's characters are young Athenians, after all. Hippolyta and Theseus seem to be a couple overseeing the event; those of us who work at universities know they probably have the title of Director of Greek Life.

It was one of the most gorgeous days of the summer, with a shining sun but no oppressive heat and humidity. The cast members, as at all the Shakespeare-in-the-park productions we've seen this week (or ever) had to compete with surrounding sounds - there was some sort of big event at the monument - but with the clear, distinct voices of the actors and the high level of activity "onstage," there really didn't seem to be any distractions.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has a large cast, and here they were uniformly excellent and worked well together. As in many productions, the actors playing Theseus and Hippolyta, whose royal marriage (in the text, it's royal anyway) is celebrated at the end of the play (along with the marriages of the young people once the "dream" of the enchanted forest is untangled and set right), also play the royal fairy couple Oberon and Titania.

Michael Kennen Miller brings athletic grace and playful determination to the role of Oberon, and his scenes with a slinky and sultry Edie Monroy as Helena (both of them exposing, or appearing to, lots of flesh) are sexy and funny. Puck here is a loose-limbed, pigtailed, slinky and also nearly-naked Krystine Summers (she doubles at the end as a jive-talking campus activities director Philostrate), who gives a nice twist to her line reading of "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

As the four young lovers caught in real and magic-induced complicated triangles and quadrangles, Angela Sharp (Hermia), Brandi Bravo (Helena), Alex Gould (Demetrius) and Andrew Sanford (Lysander), excel at physical comedy and action while preserving the wit of their poetry.

Their disputes and chases in the forest - nominally the locale for the college students' scavenger hunt - are little masterpieces of comic timing.

The working-class "actors" in the hilariously bad play also are skillful at comedy, though of the broader sort, with (truly) funny faces and slapstick, over-the-top gestures. A frustrated Petra Quince (Tai Verley), slightly smarter than her crew, has to contend with this melange of goofballs and misfits: Flute (Manuel de la Portilla), a slob who has to use a horrible falsetto and garish blond wig to play the female lover Thisbe; the wimpy, simpering Starveling (Christiana Little), who needs her stuffed animal to keep stagefright at bay as she holds a flashlight to mimic moonlight;

Snout, the dim security guard who "presenteth a wall" dressed in a brick-like dashiki; and the rubber-faced, too-eager Snug (a very funny Sora Baek), who roars the part of the lion.

The standout in the most important role among the rustics is Brent Yoshikami, the outrageously self-important and narcissistic Bottom. He's really funny, both in rehearsals and playing the lover Pyramus in the "tedious" play-within-a-play, and his scenes with a smitten-by-magic Titania (Monroy at her best) once he's turned into an ass, are priceless.

The scavenger hunt ends with a slo-mo (very slo-mo) race to the finish line to the music from Chariots of Fire. It's very funny, and of course our four prinicipals are bested by the red-T-shirted pair played by Baek and McGhee (de la Portilla and Little also double as scavengers).

It's just one of many inspired touches by director Rodriguez, who with her cast and crew, have created a unique Midsummer Night's Dream.

The play can be seen at Astoria Park's Water Walk tomorrow and over the next four weekends all over the city, in Prospect Park, Waterside Plaza, Pelham Bay Park, Inwood Hill Park, Battery Park and Queensbridge Park. We're grateful to Curious Frog Theatre Company for again bringing top-notch classic theater to some underserved communities around New York City.