Anthony Sannazzaro makes a toast as the cast looks on (all photos by Paul Rubenstein)
City Garage, the resident theatre company at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station Arts Center, built their thirty-plus year reputation for doing heavy lifting with productions of Greek tragedies and the works of Brecht and Beckett among other dramatists. With their latest offering, Cardenio, they prove they can let down their hair and have some fun on occasion. The play is a collaboration by Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and playwright Charles Mee and is based on a “lost” play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher first performed in 1613. Their play was based on a story appropriated from the Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote. The modern take sets the action in the Umbrian countryside at a wedding reception where three couples question their choices about life and love, aided or hindered by the local country bumpkins.
The cast
The only traces of the original Shakespeare are in the play-within-the-play that the groom’s parents want to offer as a wedding present. The modern authors have crafted a lot of the usual Shakespearean tropes into their comedy. On his wedding day, Anselmo (Anthony Sannazzaro) confides to his best man Will (Gifford Irvine) that he is not sure if his bride Camila (Devin Davis-Lorton) really loves him since he proposed in haste, and she accepted just as quickly. He asks Will to try to seduce Camila to test her love. The comic antics accelerate from there. Add in Matron of Honor Sally (Angela Beyer), who cheated on her flirtatious husband Edmund (Jason Pereia) because she thought he had cheated on her, the bride’s bitter sister Doris (Kat Johnston) and Susana (Natasha St. Clair-Johnson), an actress and former college classmate of the men. Stir all the various subplots lightly until the correct couplings are revealed and happy endings loom for all.
Anthony Sannazzaro, Natasha St. Clair-Johnson, Gifford Irvine and Devin Davis-Lorton
Director Frederique Michel has guided her cast through the romantic shenanigans as well as choreographed them setting up of the wedding feast to end Act One. Josephine Poinsot’s black and white costumes with touches of red and pink add a colorful tint to the various characters. Sannazzaro creates a frenetic groom akin to a silent movie comic or classic Jerry Lewis while Davis-Lorton can pout with the best of the nymphets. Johnston delivers her two lengthy diatribes against love with vitriol to spare. Troy Dunn makes the most of his handyman Rudi, the Dogberry/Bottom/Sir Andrew Augecheek of this play. Martha Duncan and Bo Roberts play the well-meaning but interfering parents. Loosema Hakverdian as the sultry maid and Andy Kallock as the Italian pasta chef complete the cast.
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