William Shakespeare's wry and nifty (if flawed) little comedy about love and friendship, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona", ends with a cheerful but orderly "exeunt".  Not so the New York Shakespeare Festival's wild, hilarious, sexy and brazenly high-handed adaptation, which concludes with a pep-fest involving, besides the entire 27-member cast onstage and singing at the top of its lungs, simultaneous high-jinks with a Frisbee, an inflated rubber ball, several Yo-Yo's, three manual bubble machines, at least four of those paddles with little rubber balls attached to them by elastic bands, one bicycle and a pair of roller skates.  It is quite an eye- and earful, and it tops off an evening of goofy and exhilarating theater in which Shakespeare, while occasionally roughed up a bit beyond the call of duty, is well served in unexpected and significant ways.

None of the ways, for sure, having anything to do with fidelity to his text.  I estimate that something like half the Bard's dialogue has been jettisoned by co-adapters John Guare, who wrote the lyrics, and Mel Shapiro, who directed, and the liberties taken with his plot and characters are, to say the least, audacious.  And while the original "Two Gentlemen" contained exactly one song (The famous "Who Is Silvia?," here outrageously burlesqued as a kind of high-school glee club madrigal), the present production has no less than 31 musical numbers composed in an olio of rock, pop and Latin styles by "Hair's" Galt MacDermot.  What we seem to have here, in brief, is a new musical comedy "based on" a Shakespeare play.

Yet, unless one is willing to accept fustiness and decorum as definitions of the "Shakespearean," it is clear that the Festival people have performed a revivification of Shakespeare - false to the letter, but true to the spirit - that borders on the miraculous.  They have done this, if you will, by keeping their source in mind while taking the nature of their audience to heart.  Much as Shakespeare labored to observe and satisfy the ideas and expectations of playgoing Londoners of his day, those responsible for the new "Two Gentlemen" have conspired that everything should be as we like it, an entertainment smorgasbord of, by and for real New Yorkers in the actual year of 1971.  With imagination, one might almost detect in the spontaneous laughter of an audience at this production - an audience of people delighted with themselves - ghostly echoes of a joyous afternoon over three centuries ago in a theater by the Thames.

It is, of course, one thing to go in for crowd-pleasing and quite another to do it with style and genius.  And, while Guare, Shapiro, et al. can lay claim to plenty of style, it is still Shakespeare who supplies the genius, in which capacity he is sometimes helped, but often enough hindered by the Festival company.  Notably, Guare's pop verse and MacDermot's slick melodies (both elegant on the whole, but a particularly cloying combination in the show's "big" song, "Love Has Driven Me Sane") tend to jar in juxtaposition with the vigor and sonority of the authors Elizabethan.  Shakespeare's sentiments about life and love may be no more true than current ones, but he just naturally makes them sound better.  And some members of the cast simply lack the range to accommodate both terms of the show's daring synthesis; at least one of the principals, an electrifying musical comedy performer, seems to lose about a foot in stature when called upon to slog through a few lines of blank verse.  But these are quibbles going only to show that nobody (except maybe Shakespeare sometimes) is perfect.

While streamlining it here and there, Guare and Shapiro have pretty much preserved the story of "Two GEntlemen", which I'll summarize.  Two friends, knightly Valentine and impulsive Proteus, attend the court of the Duke of Milan, where Valentine falls in love with the Duke's daughter Silvia, pledged by her father to the lackluster Thurio, and schemes an elopement.  Though betrothed to a girl back home - Julia, who unbeknownst to him is now in Milan disguised as a boy - Proteus also falls for Silvia, secretly foils Valentine's plot and has his friend banished.  But Silvia will have none of him and escapes with a courtier named Eglamour to the forest, where, in a notoriously implausible scene, Proteus finds and tries to rape her, is caught in the act by Valentine and begs for forgiveness.  Valentine not only pardons him but, as if to indicate no hard feelings, offers to give him Silvia, at which point Julia unmasks herself and reclaims her lover.  The Duke shows up (with Thurio, who is promptly put to shame), confers blessings all around and brings down the curtain on "One feast, one house, one mutual happiness."

On the framework of this "shallow story of deep love" (to quote one of its typically facetious lines), its adapters have hung not only a lot of zestful singing and dancing but, boldly, an up-to-date set of values about love and sex and a number of up-to-the-minute satirical sallies.  Thus Silvia is no longer an upright, lovesick maiden; she has become an ingenuous swinger who holds that action speaks louder than honeyed words (and Eglamour, no more a chaste pal, is now an ex-lover with whom she enjoys a last fling).  Shakespeare's gentle mockeries of courtly love are themselves affectionately mocked, and the self interested Proteus, the butt of ridicule in the original, is made to seem the real, if bumbling hero. Meanwhile, the Duke does not merely banish Valentine, he has him drafted - into an Army he keeps stationed abroad so he can run for re-election (sic) on a platform of "Bring The Boys Home".

But the nerviest coup of the production is as has been noted elsewhere, its interracial casting.  Two of the lovers, Proteus and Julia, and a bumpkin servant, Speed,  are played by Puerto Ricans - Raul Julia, Carla Pinza and Jose Perez, respectively.  Clifton Davis and Jonelle Allen, as Valentine and Silvia, are black, as is Norman Matlock (the Duke).  Alvin Lum (Eglamour) is Chinese.  Which leaves to palefaces the parts of Proteus's servant Launce (Jerry Stiller), Julia's servant Lucetta (Alix Elias), Thurio (Frank O'Brien) and Proteus's father Antonio and the Tavern Host (both Frederic Warriner).  It may be said with only a little irony, that all perform as credits to their race.

For this is no "integrated" show; few of the roles could be played quite decently by actors of other extraction.  Like New York itself, this "Two Gentlemen" is a melting pot whose liveliness owes to the fact that nothing in it really melts.  The clash of cultural identities which is responsible for much of our social agony is also the flint and stone of our common cultural vitality, and, with an opportunism that seems purely Shakespearean, the Festival company never misses a chance to strike sparks.  Thus Julia, in moments of passion, soars off into Spanish.  The blacks sing soul and the Puerto Ricans sing Latin (everybody sings rock and homogenized pop).  Eglamour's rage at one point is incarnated in a huge and fanciful Chinese dragon.  And Proteus earns an easy but long, grateful laugh by mugging on the fortuitous lines of Shakespeare, "And Silvia - witness Heaven, that made her fair!.....Shows Julia but a swarthy Ethiope."

Speaking of Proteus, I can't close before making special mention of the man who plays him, Raul Julia.  He is a breathtaking actor.  In the midst of the general disheveled wackiness he is able, through sheer presence and disciplined delivery, to establish a whole new tempo, making one hang with awed attention on each syllable of a soliloquy.  And when, moments later, he throws his imposing voice and body into a rousing comic calypso, one begins to wonder if there's anything he can't do - like for instance, fly.  But in thus citing him I would not imply and serious lack in his fellow players, all of whom are good - at Shakespeare, at musical comedy or at both.  His performance is only one of the outstanding riches in an embarrassment of them, a lode of theatrical splendors that simply must be seen to be believed.

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