THE LITTLE LOVES OF SHAKESPEARE
That seldom happens in the Avenue Theatre’s ironically titled The Little Loves of Shakespeare. “Little” indeed . . . Both well- and lesser-known love scenes are lifted from the context of some seven plays. And this 180-minute assemblage manages to grind down Shakespeare’s astonishing emotional range to the assembly-line dimensions of an interminably tedious community-theater audition.
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The fact that you don’t have to pay royalties to Shakespeare is not reason enough to perform his work.
Whatever love can be gleaned from these scenes gets no help from the wooden recitations. The lovers’ tangles that fuel A Midsummer Night’s Dream are tepid and automatic, unworthy even of Pyramus and Thisbe; the recognition scene that ends Pericles feels hollow as a drum; and there’s hardly a hint of humor in Touchstone’s dalliance with Audrey, a girl of remarkably reliable stupidity.
