Puppets make for a wooden "Windsor"
By Robert Hurwitt
June 5, 2006

The wives are truly merry, but "The Merry Wives of Windsor" that opened Saturday at the Bruns Amphitheater is not. Meant to be an audacious blend of live action and innovative puppetry, the California Shakespeare Theater's season opener simply proves that -- whatever he achieved in other branches of the dramatic arts -- Shakespeare didn't write very good puppet shows.

It also demonstrates how empty "Merry Wives" can be without Falstaff. Which is not to say that the fat knight is physically absent from director Sean Daniels' production. The huge but oddly weightless Falstaff puppet -- with its bulbous nose, almost toothless mouth, fringe of white beard and spiky-stubble hair -- is the biggest thing onstage. He's also played by one of the Bay Area's finest comic actors, Ron Campbell. But Campbell is so completely hidden within the puppet that even his line readings are muffled. And the puppet is so inexpressive that Falstaff is reduced to an occasionally comic prop.

However unlikely the oft-told tale that Queen Elizabeth was so entertained by the witty, roguish knight in "Henry IV, Part 1" that she commanded Shakespeare to write a comedy about Falstaff in love, the story holds a kernel of truth. There can be little doubt that "Wives" was written to take advantage of the character's immediate popularity. That said, it's also true that this Falstaff is a pretty pale shadow of the "Henry IV" creation, mostly a foil for the comedy of the wives' revenge against him. There's a lot of other comedy in the play, some of which comes through in Daniels' production.

It couldn't have opened more auspiciously. The weather was unusually balmy, a rare shirtsleeve evening for comedy at the Bruns. Scott Bradley's storybook set looks like an open invitation to humorous creativity, with its Windsor houses concealed within an arch of cutout trees and shrubbery. The puppet designs -- by Jon Ludwig, Chris Brown and Jason Hines of Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts -- are delightfully outrageous and varied: rod puppets, full-body puppets, marionettes, Bunraku and hand puppets, ranging from the thick, bright yellow cross for the Welsh parson Hugh and giant-pill-bottle Dr. Caius to the antique-pistol-headed Pistol and small-mailbox messenger Simple.

But the creativity doesn't run very deep and often works against the play's strengths. This is Daniels' second attempt at blending Shakespeare and puppetry, after a problematic "Comedy of Errors" a few years ago. In that case, the principal roles were essentially double-cast, each played by an actor and his or her puppet-double, but the actors weren't particularly capable puppeteers. This time, Daniels divides the roles between actors and puppets and pushes for an animated cartoon effect, with lots of puppet-slapstick and a heavy use of cartoon-style mood music, rim-shots and sound effects in Dave Malloy's soundscape.

The flesh-and-blood actors stand out like breaths of fresh air. Catherine Castellanos' Mistress Page and Delia MacDougall's Mistress Ford are delightfully smart and broadly comic as the wives Falstaff tries to seduce, as they plot and execute his due comeuppance. Anthony Fusco is hilarious as the jealousy-plagued Master Ford, his body contorting in tortured spasms that make the puppets seem inanimate. Liam Vincent is congenially upbeat as the happily married Page.

Of the actors hidden within puppets, only Danny Scheie manages to make his characters come alive. He delivers a tour de force of verbal comedy in a wild French accent as the fulminating, English-mangling Dr. Caius and manages to make the rantings of Falstaff's hotheaded follower Pistol pretty funny as well (aided by the pistol puppet's hair trigger). None of the other puppets, mostly handled by Puppetry Arts veterans, demonstrate similar depth. Lorna Howley's Mistress Quickly, the would-be clever matchmaker, has a comic broom-like hip swing but speaks her lines as if she were explaining the plot to children. As clever as the designs look at first -- the lovely Anne Page floating on her romantic dreams with rose petals fluttering from under her dress -- almost every character has been reduced to a one-line joke.

Little of the comedy of the three-way rivalry for Anne's hand remains, not just because the script has been severely cut but because the puppets aren't capable of exploiting it. The same is sadly true even of the usually hilarious scenes of Falstaff's wooing of Mistress Ford, with MacDougall working hard for laughs against an almost inert, if oddly cuddly Falstaff. Given Puppetry Arts' reputation, it's hard to understand why this primary puppet is so awkwardly handled and inexpressive. There are some wonderfully inventive puppetry bits throughout the show -- a deep-sea gambit is particularly funny -- though few of them have much to do with the play. Much more of the production seems to aim no higher than a puppet equivalent of animated cartoons -- and not classic animation but the third-rate, Saturday morning, made-for-TV variety. It may be that there's a great puppet show buried within "Merry Wives" waiting to be born. This isn't it.