Author: Tom Williams

Filter Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night is billed as a “raucous” hybrid between Shakespeare’s comedy, a rock concert, and an improv sketch show. That kind of humor is best-suited to people, probably mostly young ones, who are familiar with the play, but want to see it used in a highly informal manner. That’s not a bad idea with a comedy, but the Filter production, now at Chicago Shakespeare as part of the Shakespeare 400 Festival, hardly derives any of its humor from Shakespeare’s text, or even his characters and situations. Instead, the six actors and two musicians use the play’s heavy focus on music (the food of love) as an excuse to play with sound for ninety minutes.

People who have read the book will probably also have a much easier time following the action and understanding what is intended with each character. But on its own, this adaptation is wobbly, and the choices in production don’t help illuminate the script.

There’s plenty of humor in this story about the inner circle of a young country star, and structurally, the early part of the play bears more than a passing resemblance to Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, although its humor is never farcical. But the seriousness of the situations and suffering Roberts raises in his play isn’t given the focus it needs in its brief ninety minutes, resulting in a show that is a comedy in a similar sense to how Anton Chekhov used the word to describe his plays.

This is a commendable instance in which a youth theatre show has made a difficult, complex question understandable and relevant to teens without insulting their intelligence, or ours. The deliberations may have different results at the high school showings, but the balance of the viewpoints presented is sure to keep up the quality of the discourse. There are a few public performances remaining, so older people have the chance to weigh in, too.

The story, which depicts two alternate timelines, is one of the more interesting concepts to come from a Broadway stage recently, and this tour features two of the leading Broadway actors of their generation: Jackie Burns, of the tour of Wicked, and Anthony Rapp, who played Mark Cohen in the first Broadway production of Rent.