BOULDER WEEKLY: Review: Get your Bard on

Double your pleasure with CSF comedy

(Above: Can-can dancers Spencer Althoff, Paige Canepa Olson, Naomy Ambroise and Mare Trevathan in “The Comedy of Errors.” Photo by Jennifer M Koskinen.)

The BolderBoulder has already bounded by. Cottonwood tufts blanket the ground like allergy-nightmare snow. Thermometers regularly top out in the 90s and with University of Colorado’s students on break, there’s a bit more elbowroom all around the town. It’s early summer in beautiful Boulder, and that means it’s time for one of the nation’s most renowned and anticipated Shakespeare festivals, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF), to once again dazzle denizens of delightful theatre.

That’s right. It’s time to get your Bard on.

This year’s CSF features five plays, four by Shakespeare himself (The Comedy of Errors, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, and Henry VI – Part 2) and one starring a fictionalized version of him (Equivocation).

While the argument will rage eternal as to whether Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies or histories are his best work, it’s no secret that audiences generally respond most warmly to the comedies. It is therefore no surprise that the 2016 CSF opens with the classic and ever-popular farce, The Comedy of Errors.

So seminal are the shenanigans found in The Comedy of Errors that Joyce DeWitt, Suzanne Somers and John Ritter (may he rest in giggling peace) arguably owe their careers to it. For thoughThe Comedy of Errors may have been nearly 400 years old when the sitcom Three’s Company first hit the small screen, its fingerprints are all over the misadventures of the Mr. Roper-dodging roommates Janet, Chrissy and Jack.

As is often the case with Shakespeare productions, the setting of The Comedy of Errors has been modernized…read the full review here.