When John Guare was talking about his award-winning House of Blue Leaves a couple of months ago, he casually mentioned that he was going to write the lyrics to a few Galt MacDermot songs that were being added to Shakespeare’s Two Gentleman of Verona in the Central Park production this summer. Well it turned out to be the understatement of the year. What has happened, in fact, is that Guare and MacDermot have written thirty-one songs and that the playwright and director Mel Shapiro have so altered the stage action to accommodate them that the show ends up being the least Shakespearean evening in the long history of this festival.
What this production does is to take a modern look at the absurdity of the kind of “love” that Shakespeare was depicting in this silly but sometimes charming old comedy. By making Proteus and Julia Puerto Rican and Valentine and Silvia black, Messrs. Guare and Shapiro have made specific and modern relationships traditionally left vague and archaic.
The play’s romantic notions are all questioned and delightfully exploded. The show’s theme song “I Love My Father,” states the case for free love, reminding us that “You can’t love another without loving yourself” and that you must practice on the world to become a true lover.
We see Proteus practice on Julia rather more realistically than usual and then dash off to Milan to fall in love with Silvia, whom all the swains adore. When he must sabotage his best friend, Valentine, who is also in love with Silvia, he justifies his action by the simple principle that love comes ahead of friendship.
The play’s romantic entanglements don’t really matter too much. We know that they will come out all right in the end, and we are delighted that Guare is having such fun with the material. There is an amusing number about how a ridiculously long string of pearls keeps getting in the way of the kissing and other amorous mechanics. The Duke of Milan draws a big topical laugh when he chants, “If I’m re-elected I’ll bring all the boys back home.” Silvia’s pompous fiancee, Thurio, does an uproarious samba in which he goes wild about his own physical assets. But the number that stops the show is “Night Letter.” Here Silvia goes to Valentine’s Western Union office to send a message to her lover. The song bursts with all the energy of repressed love as Silvia reminds herself, “Nothing better than a hot night letter.”
The catchy number is given an all-out performance by Jonelle Allen and Clifton Davis, and it seems to rock the whole park. Raul Julia and Carla Pinza, who occasionally lapse into Spanish phrases, are also wonderfully saucy as Proteus and Julia. Frank O’Brien is perfect as the stuffy Thurio. And Jerry Stiller and his dog effectively add a little Yiddish to the comic monologues Shakespeare wrote for Launce.
Perhaps the most typical Guare lyric is “You live in the mansion I call my heart that I keep beneath my doublet. You live there on a permanent lease nothing like a sublet. You rent my heart, now you control it. If this is rent control then I extol it.” When Joseph Papp takes this show to Broadway, as he plans to, he is going to have to find ways to utilize even more of Guare’s special talent. Meanwhile; in the park his merry rape of the Bard is just about the liveliest event in the long history of the New York Shakespeare Fesitval.
Copyright Saturday Review Magazine.