DAILY CAMERA: Review: Madcap fun fills Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s ‘The Comedy of Errors’

There are Shakespeare plays where soliloquies rend the very heavens, while the characters and their trials plumb the depths of the human experience. And then there’s “The Comedy of Errors.” And oh my Bard, it’s fun.

“The Comedy of Errors” is Shakespeare’s shortest play, and also the one that’s most written for the yuks. This isn’t about plausibility or character development — it’s about madcap action, and identically-named identical twins, and characters running into each other at just the wrong time. Faced with a plot like this, there’s really only one option for a cast to take: dive headfirst into the insanity and revel in every last drop.

Director Geoffrey Kent and his band of players did exactly that as the Colorado Shakespeare Festival kicked off another season with the opening of “Comedy” on Saturday at the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre on the University of Colorado Campus.

It helps that Kent’s take on it is set in the 1930s — the golden age of the screwball comedy — and in Paris, which allows lots of feathered showgirls, wandering mimes, bright red doors, and other colorful setting details.

And then there’s the flip — in an unusual casting choice, the twin brothers at the heart of the production are now twin sisters (Carolyn Holding and Kelsey Didion), as are their faithful, wacky servants (Lindsey Kyler and Emelie O’Hara). That also flips many of the characters who play off them, such as the exasperated husband and artist Adriano (Steven Cole Hughes), his quiet and quickly overwhelmed brother Luciano (Christopher Joel Onken), and a Paramour (Spencer Althoff) whose take on a Parisian showgirl has to be seen to be believed.

The switch creates not only…read the full article here.