Weekend: Break out some comedy

Break out some comedy

Shakespeare probably would applaud a rap adaptation of his play. His lines also join rhythm and poetry, his use of language is often brash - and he'd love the staging in a park.

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic

Shakespeare probably would applaud a rap adaptation of his play. His lines also join rhythm and poetry, his use of language is often brash -- and he'd love the staging in a park.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Shakespeare is either spinning in his grave, or he's rapping. Hip-hop has joined up with the bard in an "ad-RAP-tation" of The Comedy of Errors.

The Bomb-itty of Errors is this year's edition of American Stage Shakespeare in the Park, opening Friday with a four-man cast and a deejay rapping through the comedy on a graffiti-covered set on the St. Petersburg waterfront.

Let Andy Goldberg, director of Bomb-itty, make the case for the marriage of Shakespeare and rap.

"Both Shakespeare's verse and rap are rooted in rhythm," Goldberg said. "For Shakespeare, it's iambic pentameter, and in rap, the beat. Rhyming couplets are the basic unit in Shakespeare and rap. Then there's the sense of excitement and adventure about language as a malleable tool. Shakespeare invented hundreds of words. Today, if you look where the most exciting new linguistic and verbal pyrotechnics are happening, it's in rap music."

Goldberg has been with Bomb-itty since its creation four years ago, when it was a senior class project by the four authors and original performers -- Jordan Allen-Dutton, Jason Catalano, Gregory J. Qaiyum and Erik Weiner -- at New York University. Remarkably, it went on to become a hit in commercial productions in New York and Chicago. Last year, it won the grand prize at the HBO Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. An MTV movie is in the works.

The American Stage production will be the largest yet, and the first one to be performed outdoors.

"I've always felt like this was a piece that should be outdoors because it's so hard to contain it with walls," said cast member Charles Anthony Burks, who was also in the New York and Chicago companies. "It's such a massive piece. You explode onstage. Outdoors, it's going to be incredible."

Neil DeGroot, interim artistic director of American Stage, brought in Bomb-itty for the 17th Shakespeare in the Park. It's the first park show not commissioned and adapted by the theater, though it features, except for Burks, a new cast and the addition of break dancers.

"It doesn't mean in the future we won't create our own shows again," DeGroot said. "It just means this was a golden opportunity. We've been told by quite a few people that there are other theaters in the country that are very jealous that we've managed to get the play."

If any Shakespeare play could be turned into a rapper's delight, then A Comedy of Errors is a good candidate. "As early Shakespeare, it's not one of his best plays," Goldberg said. "It seems ripe for liberal adaptation."

Before Bomb-itty, it was the source for other far-fetched treatments, such as the Rodgers and Hart 1938 musical The Boys from Syracuse and a circus-style production by jugglers extraordinaire the Flying Karamazov Brothers in 1987.

Shakespeare's shortest play, it is a knockabout farce about identical twins named Antipholus, separated at infancy in a shipwreck, who both happen to have twin servants named Dromio. Mistaken identity runs rampant.

The hip-hop version more or less follows the Shakespearean plot, though it drops the servants and makes the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios each a set of twins -- actually, quadruplets who were split up when their father, a rapper, winds up in prison for peddling pot. The four actors play 16 different characters, with 73 costume changes, from bike messenger to cop, Rastafarian herb doctor to prostitute to jeweler, with even a cameo of Shakespeare himself.

The show is entirely rapped to music played by New York deejay Kevin Shand on a MPC 2000 sampler-sequencer and turntables. Shand ran the turntables for another Shakespearean hybrid, The Donkey Show, a disco version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that is popular in New York clubs. He finds Bomb-itty much more complex because of the interaction between deejay and actors.

"This is a whole other level," Shand said. "In clubs, it's all just me. I don't have to worry about what anyone else is doing, and I can just arbitrarily decide when things have to happen. But here there's a level of improvisation. Much of the score is set, but I also play off the actors doing their runs."

However, while the aim is to seem improvisational, Bomb-itty is tightly scripted, with the actors trading lines at a pell-mell pace. The show can be tricky to cast because performers have to be able to act and rap. Actors in this production are into hip-hop to varying degrees, but all were trained in theater.

"This piece falls into kind of a trap," Burks said. "Is it a rap concert or is it a play? For me, it's a play with music."

"It reminds me of a rap opera," said Chris Edwards, a New York actor and director. "Even when there's not music being played through the speakers, there's either man-made music or rhythmic back and forth, like beat poetry."

"For me this is just a golden show," said Joe Hernandez-Kolski, who works out of Los Angeles. "The hip-hop culture is something that fascinates me and that I love, but I've also been an actor since I've been a kid. To be able to bring the two together is a blast."

Also in the cast are ranney, a Tampa-based actor and comedian, and a six-member dance troupe, choreographed by Paulette Johnson.

In previous productions, Bomb-itty was performed without an intermission, running about 90 minutes. The park show will have a break, with the cast doing the traditional intermission number a la MC Hammer.

"At first I was nervous about the intermission, but I think it will be great," Goldberg said. "I've heard a lot of people say all along that the words come so fast that they would appreciate a break. It could actually help the show. But I don't know. That's definitely the big question."

There's also the question of the audience. American Stage is hoping its adventurous, high-profile production will draw young people. The cast went to Ybor City to hand out fliers and work the crowds. Young people haven't turned out in large numbers for a park show since a punk-rock version of Macbeth was a hit in 1997.

"I think the community at large is ready for something like this," DeGroot said. "I think it will reach people who have never been to Shakespeare before."

At the same time, the theater seeks to soothe people who might be scared off by hip-hop's edgy image or the occasional racy lyric, not to mention the racket of a rap show. DeGroot likened Bomb-itty to a PG-rated movie.

"In the end I think the show is charming because the intent is so clear, so fun from the outset," he said. "Sometimes I listen to rap music and the purpose of it is obviously to assault the senses. This doesn't assault you."

Mindful of a family audience, Goldberg, in collaboration with the authors, has come up with some different words for profanities in the original script.

"It's all in good, clean fun," he said. "It's bawdy like Shakespeare's bawdy, or like a Disney movie. I think people will be really attracted by the energy, the creativity, the charisma of the performers."

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PREVIEW: The American Stage Shakespeare in the Park production of The Bomb-itty of Errors opens Friday and runs through May 12 at Demens Landing on the downtown St. Petersburg waterfront. Performances are Wednesday through Sunday at 8 p.m.; gates open at 6 p.m. General admission blanket seats: $7 (Wed., Thur., Sun.) and $10 (Fri., Sat.); reserved chairs: $22. For information and reservations, call (727) 823-PLAY.