Mingus Union High School’s theater program, A Troupe of Ridiculous Thespians, is fresh off from wining numerous statewide awards, including Best Musical for “Newsies” last spring.
They are coming back starting this weekend with five performances of “Shakespeare In Love,” adapted by Lee Hall from the screenplay by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman.
As an adaptation of the Best Picture-winning 1998 film, the play tells a fictionalized story of the legendary William Shakespeare, broke and suffering from writer’s block, drawing inspiration to write “Romeo and Juliet” from a whirlwind romance with a merchant’s daughter, Viola, who secretly dresses up as a man to perform in the Bard’s plays, unbeknownst to her new lover.
It’s a high-energy comedy that portrays Shakespeare as a character of high drama and wit not unlike those of his own creations, and weaves in words of much of the playwright’s classic works in the process.
“It’s a love story, it’s comedic, it has swordfights, it has a dog doing tricks on stage; it really does have a conglomeration of everything,” Mingus Theater Director James Ball said of the play. Though Ball had been a fan of the film for years, he got the idea to do the stage adaptation after seeing it along with his students at a field trip to the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City two years ago. After seeing the students howl with laughter at the play, he jumped at the opportunity to let them perform it as soon as the rights were available for high school performances.
“It’s very poetic in the writing, so if you have a love of language and Shakespeare, you’ll have a deep appreciation for it,” Ball said. He pointed to the frequency of scenes of classic Shakespearian dialogue, mostly from Romeo and Juliet but from other works as well, but also highlighted that with the vast majority of the play is written in modern dialogue and heavy on wit and humor, it would still remain enjoyable for people who slept through the Shakespeare unit in high school English.
For senior Vanessa Alcala, who stars as Viola and who played Rose Ritz in last year’s “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” thinks that love of language is essential to her character, Viola, who falls in love with Shakespeare by falling in love with his works.
“Viola is truly in love with poetry, and she just thinks Shakespeare is the best poet in the whole world,” Alcala said. “She just wants to be on stage, and have that poetry come to life. When she finds out that it’s Shakespeare, I think she falls in love with his words first.”
The embodiment of those words is played by Mingus senior, Zeke Collins, who played Ebeneezer Scrooge in last year’s “A Christmas Carol.” Collins has been a fan of the film ever since he saw it as a kid, and describes this version of Shakespeare as his “dream role.”
Collins said he was inspired not only by the words of Shakespeare but by the film’s writer, the acclaimed British playwright, Stoppard, who is known for his highly complex yet relentlessly funny plays such as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “The Real Thing,” and whom Collins sees as a “modern Shakespeare.”
Collins says he finds the character of Shakespeare by trying to understand the connection for the writer between what he writes and experiencing real life.
“It’s a real portrayal of something fake,” Collins said. “I’m young, but I understand what it’s like to feel for somebody, so I don’t find it very difficult to put real emotions into my character.”
As a stage adaptation of a fast-paced high-concept comedy, Shakespeare provides its own level of challenge for a theatrical production, which tries to hold on to the film’s love of switching locations in the middle of a single conversation or single scene.
According to Ball, the play represents the most difficult set design effort by the technical theater department, which created a moving set on rails, allowing for different settings to come in and out of the scene while the actors perform their lines.
“It gets hectic because you’ll have three stages going on at once and three different scenes going on at once,” said Stage Manager and Mingus senior Asa Marette. “You have to understand where everyone is supposed to be at that time and just making sure of the timing of the lines. A lot of the parts of the show are overlapping each other and talking over each other just to give that Shakespeare feel, having this urgency. Backstage there’s also this urgency, and it just shows how his life is intertwined with theater.”
“Shakespeare In Love” premieres Saturday, Oct. 26, at 7 p.m., with a matinee on Sunday Oct. 27, at 3 p.m. Additional performances will be held the following Friday and Saturday nights at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.. Tickets are $12 for adults, $11 for children, and $8 for children if bought in advance, or $3 more at the door. Advanced tickets can be purchased at www.show tix4u.com/events/atort, in person at the MUHS book- store, or by calling the box office at 649-4466.
