‘Bard Crawl’ to re-create rowdy atmosphere
Duke City Rep to stage performances at local breweries
In days of 17th-century London’s Globe Theatre, Shakespeare fans came to eat, drink and heckle.
The folks at Duke City Repertory want to bring back those days of unfettered fun through their Second Annual “Bard Crawl: Love’s Labour’s Lost” opening on Friday at Dialogue Brewery. The troupe will travel to seven brew pubs across Albuquerque through May 13.
“A brewery or a bar is the closest we can get in 21st-century America to what the Globe Theatre was like,” company member Katie Becker Colon said. “People were there to eat, drink and talk.”
If they didn’t like the proceedings, the rowdy crowd never hesitated to harangue the company, sometimes even dragging actors from the stage.
“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” an early comedy, is the latest effort. The play draws on themes of masculine love and desire, reckoning and rationalization, and reality versus fantasy.
“It’s a group of men who swear off women for three years to study,” Colon said. “As soon as they do that, some very attractive women show up.
“It’s a romance, but
there’s a lot of comedy there,” she added. “They sing and dance a lot of fun stuff.”
Last year, the group produced “Twelfth Night” at five breweries. Their surveys showed people returned multiple times.
“We didn’t know if it would go over,” Colon said. “But it was a great success.”
The actors passed the hat for donations and made more money than they had for any other production, she added.
“The food trucks on a Monday were doing weekend numbers.”
The troupe gleaned the idea from a similar project located at a single Chicago brewery known as Back Room Shakespeare.
Improvisation adds to the fun, Colon said. The company wants to reverse the stereotype of Shakespeare as a boring evening spent sitting in the dark.