Comic actor shines playing against type
Scheie wrings every drop of juice out of Shakespeare’s wry dialogue
California Shakespeare Theater’s Saturday, Aug. 25, opening night occasioned some theatrical blasphemy: Danny Scheie’s best scenes in “The War of the Roses” are when the actor isn’t trying to be funny.
Normally, you should relish any chance to hear the Bay Area’s foremost comic actor (there, I said it!) drop into one of his cartoon voices — like the reedy, lisping one that sounds like an effeminate space alien — or simply claw into a line of dialogue and wring every drop of juice out of it.
And Scheie does earn laughs as Richard III in Eric Ting and Philippa Kelly’s new adaptation, which combines four Shakespeare history plays — the “Henry VI” trilogy and
“Richard III” — into a single, four-hour theatrical evening chronicling the epic battle between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne.
When the murderous usurper Richard stages a scene of false piety, proclaiming to a crowd that he would not be king, that he’d “rather hide me from my greatness” and keep his nose stuck in his Bible, how can you not chuckle as Scheie widens and lowers his eyes, drifting reluctantly from kneeling prayer to public address, as if Richard floats above worldly cares, too angelic for ambition?
Yet, many of these laughs come limned in disappointment. As Richard kills and dissembles his way to the throne, leaving a trail of corpses — kings and princes, even Richard’s own brothers and wife — those zany Scheie voices and cockeyed expressions that usually fit just right here strain and slacken like an old bag of tricks.
For Scheie succeeds most as Richard when he gets to play against type: when he breathes his soliloquies into a handheld microphone, as self-serious and vacant-eyed as an emo band’s frontman. Richard doesn’t need to squall or stoop to comedy to command attention. He can speak low and direct his attention inward, paying obeisance at his own altar of self-worship, in Richard’s view the only arena worthy of consideration. Paradoxically, you convert to his church when he makes it so abundantly clear he doesn’t require you.
He’s as mysterious and eerie as a cult leader, a vibe that owes just as much to the show’s adrenaline-pumping music, composed by Byron Au Yong and performed by Josh Pollock (who doubles as many small ensemble roles). First guitar chords sound like a witch screaming in the distance. Instantly, the hills that always seem so idyllic and welcoming behind Cal Shakes’ Bruns Amphitheater become haunted, menacing, like clumped monsters starting to rear from dormancy.
The real monsters in “The War of the Roses” are men’s bloodthirsty ambition and a system of government that can’t check but rewards that ambition. Ting and Kelly’s cinematic adaptation, full of cross-cutting and transitions that let coming scenes seep into the the current one, never gives this rabble of would-be kings a moment’s breath. There’s no time for reflection or vulnerability, and that’s exactly the point.
If the show’s focus dilutes somewhat after Richard is crowned, Ting, who also directs, and his cast make enough illuminating choices to render the four-hour endeavor a worthy one. Cal Shakes veterans Stacy Ross and Lance Gardner bring surgical incisiveness to a variety of ensemble roles, cutting to the beating heart of thorny monologues.
Jomar Tagatac as Richard Plantagenet makes a speech that on paper is as dry as the “begats” from Leviticus into a celebratory, chest-pounding roar. As the warrior Queen Margaret, Aysan Celik augments her virtuoso curses with singing, and her ghoulish voice, spanning registers and sliding on semitones, seems to open up the earth to unleash demons below.
Joseph Patrick O’Malley makes Henry VI painfully ripe for overthrow, hunching or flinching in jammies or a Tshirt, his tremulous voice and owl’s eyes as out of place in this world as if he’d been teleported in.
Soon enough, he’s untimely sent back to the alien land whence he came. But Henry VI might only be the most obvious outsider in “The War of the Roses.” Part of Shakespeare’s point in these history plays is that no human, not even Richard “that dog, that had his teeth before his eyes,” can survive long in a system of government so eternally ripe for coup.