Monday, June 5, 2006 (SF Chronicle)
Puppets make for a wooden 'Windsor'
Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic

The Merry Wives of Windsor: Comedy. By William Shakespeare. Directed by
Sean Daniels. Through June 25. California Shakespeare Theater, Bruns
Amphitheater, Gateway Blvd. exit from Highway 24, between Berkeley and
Orinda. Two hours, 20 minutes. Tickets $15-$57. Call (510) 548-9666 or
visit www.calshakes.org).

The wives are truly merry, but "The Merry Wives of Windsor" that opened
Saturday at the Bruns Amphitheater is not. Meant to be an audacious blend
of live action and innovative puppetry, the California Shakespeare
Theater's season opener simply proves that -- whatever he achieved in
other branches of the dramatic arts -- Shakespeare didn't write very good
puppet shows.
It also demonstrates how empty "Merry Wives" can be without Falstaff.
Which is not to say that the fat knight is physically absent from director
Sean Daniels' production. The huge but oddly weightless Falstaff puppet --
with its bulbous nose, almost toothless mouth, fringe of white beard and
spiky-stubble hair -- is the biggest thing onstage. He's also played by
one of the Bay Area's finest comic actors, Ron Campbell. But Campbell is
so completely hidden within the puppet that even his line readings are
muffled. And the puppet is so inexpressive that Falstaff is reduced to an
occasionally comic prop.
However unlikely the oft-told tale that Queen Elizabeth was so entertained
by the witty, roguish knight in "Henry IV, Part 1" that she commanded
Shakespeare to write a comedy about Falstaff in love, the story holds a
kernel of truth. There can be little doubt that "Wives" was written to
take advantage of the character's immediate popularity. That said, it's
also true that this Falstaff is a pretty pale shadow of the "Henry IV"
creation, mostly a foil for the comedy of the wives' revenge against him.
There's a lot of other comedy in the play, some of which comes through in
Daniels' production.
It couldn't have opened more auspiciously. The weather was unusually
balmy, a rare shirtsleeve evening for comedy at the Bruns. Scott Bradley's
storybook set looks like an open invitation to humorous creativity, with
its Windsor houses concealed within an arch of cutout trees and shrubbery
The puppet designs -- by Jon Ludwig, Chris Brown and Jason Hines of
Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts -- are delightfully outrageous and
varied: rod puppets, full-body puppets, marionettes, Bunraku and hand
puppets, ranging from the thick, bright yellow cross for the Welsh parson
Hugh and giant-pill-bottle Dr. Caius to the antique-pistol-headed Pistol
and small-mailbox messenger Simple.
But the creativity doesn't run very deep and often works against the
play's strengths. This is Daniels' second attempt at blending Shakespeare
and puppetry, after a problematic "Comedy of Errors" a few years ago. In
that case, the principal roles were essentially double-cast, each played
by an actor and his or her puppet-double, but the actors weren't
particularly capable puppeteers. This time, Daniels divides the roles
between actors and puppets and pushes for an animated cartoon effect, with
lots of puppet-slapstick and a heavy use of cartoon-style mood music,
rim-shots and sound effects in Dave Malloy's soundscape.
The flesh-and-blood actors stand out like breaths of fresh air. Catherine
Castellanos' Mistress Page and Delia MacDougall's Mistress Ford are
delightfully smart and broadly comic as the wives Falstaff tries to
seduce, as they plot and execute his due comeuppance. Anthony Fusco is
hilarious as the jealousy-plagued Master Ford, his body contorting in
tortured spasms that make the puppets seem inanimate. Liam Vincent is
congenially upbeat as the happily married Page.
Of the actors hidden within puppets, only Danny Scheie manages to make his
characters come alive. He delivers a tour de force of verbal comedy in a
wild French accent as the fulminating, English-mangling Dr. Caius and
manages to make the rantings of Falstaff's hotheaded follower Pistol
pretty funny as well (aided by the pistol puppet's hair trigger).
None of the other puppets, mostly handled by Puppetry Arts veterans,
demonstrate similar depth. Lorna Howley's Mistress Quickly, the would-be
clever matchmaker, has a comic broom-like hip swing but speaks her lines
as if she were explaining the plot to children. As clever as the designs
look at first -- the lovely Anne Page floating on her romantic dreams with
rose petals fluttering from under her dress -- almost every character has
been reduced to a one-line joke.
Little of the comedy of the three-way rivalry for Anne's hand remains, not
just because the script has been severely cut but because the puppets
aren't capable of exploiting it. The same is sadly true even of the
usually hilarious scenes of Falstaff's wooing of Mistress Ford, with
MacDougall working hard for laughs against an almost inert, if oddly
cuddly Falstaff. Given Puppetry Arts' reputation, it's hard to understand
why this primary puppet is so awkwardly handled and inexpressive.
There are some wonderfully inventive puppetry bits throughout the show --
a deep-sea gambit is particularly funny -- though few of them have much to
do with the play. Much more of the production seems to aim no higher than
a puppet equivalent of animated cartoons -- and not classic animation but
the third-rate, Saturday morning, made-for-TV variety. It may be that
there's a great puppet show buried within "Merry Wives" waiting to be
born. This isn't it.