Buntport Theater

show-7

Two people wearing clothes that look Shakespearean, but are made from jeans, are holding hands and skipping in front of a van painted like a forest. There is a plastic owl on the van's side mirror.

Rocky Mountain New- The Bard lightens up in Buntport’s ‘Titus’

In its version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the six-member troupe twists a tragic tale of revenge and deceit into a manic, melodramatic musical, filled with oodles of fake blood, clever pop-song covers and abundant sarcasm.The Bard is never boring in the hands of the capable Buntport Theater clan.

It’s far from the traditional Titus but tons more fun.

Buntport presents the play as a band of roving performers (known as the Van-O-Players), harking back to the vagabond troupes who traveled the countryside in Shakespeare’s day. The Van-O-Players carry props, costumes, a musician and a player piano in their dilapidated but colorful vehicle — the essentials for making light of one of the Bard’s least-liked works.

Because they’re few in number, each player takes on multiple roles, transitioning from character to character by donning a fake beard, cowboy hat or other silly prop. The group’s musician (the multitalented Muni Kulasinghe) plays such a vast array of characters that he pastes strips of paper to his chest to indicate which personality he’s portraying at any given time. He also tracks the play’s mounting death toll on a small black chalkboard.

The Van-O-Players present an abbreviated adaptation of Titus but stick somewhat closely to the play’s plotline, which details the downfall of a Roman general in a Melrose Place-type fashion.

The Buntport tribe (made up of Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman and their offstage counterparts Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz) have a grand time poking fun at this poorly constructed play.

The groups shrewdly sprinkle songs throughout the scenes to highlight the absurdity of specific characters and situations. The new emperor, for example, celebrates his ascension with ragtime playing in the background, his loyal subjects dancing around him sporting toothy smiles and jazz hands.

A plotting lover sings about seeking revenge for his sweetheart over a cover of ABBA’s Fernando, chatting up murderers while doing the cha-cha.

Even versions of Bobby Darrin’s Beyond the Sea and Britney Spears’ Oops I Did it Again make appearances.

The props also provide comic relief. Two characters are portrayed by hand puppets; one is made of a rusty gas can, and the other is an old car radio with a shoeshine brush serving as a spiky hair covered head.

Blood is bountiful, pouring like a river out of the performer’s guts, mouths, hands, etc. By the end of the play, the actors could easily double as extras for the next Scream sequel.

And the show has a surprisingly high production value, considering that the troupe’s psychedelic van is the set. With scenes painted on its sides, the vehicle serves as a grand palace one minute, a lush, green forest the next.

But gimmicks aside, what makes this spoof succeed is the cast’s commitment. The performers are consistently solid, from Rollman as the devilishly delightful Queen Tamora (who punctuates nearly every scene with a wicked laugh) to Kulasinghe, who sprints between characters with Michael Lewis like speed.

But hurry if you want to see the Bard’s bloodiest play performed Buntport Theater style. The show, postponed by two weeks because of Colonna’s emergency appendectomy, will end its run Sunday.

-Erika Gonzalez, May 17, 2002, Rocky Mountain News

Five people are draped on and around a painted van. They all wear makeshift Shakespearean clothing. In front is a smiling man with his hands out. The hood of the van has a large smiling portrait of him. One smiling man is draped across the hood. Sitting on top of the van are three more people holding a banner that says “van-o-players”.

Denver Post- A bloody tragedy turns into a hoot: Buntport’s ‘Titus’ a biting parody

(*Revised from published version with permission*)

“Titus Andronicus” has long been regarded as Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy. Who knew it could also be his funniest comedy?

Buntport Theatre spoofs the Bard with the intelligent and endlessly inventive send-up “Titus Andronicus! The Musical.” The body count (kept on a chalkboard scorecard) tops out at 35 (seven times the number of people in the cast), but the only tragedy here is that the smartypants at the Buntport were forced to shorten their run to just two weekends. Brian Colonna, who plays Titus, underwent an emergency appendectomy just before the April 25 opening, delaying things by two weeks. But he’s back in full flourish, and he’s got scads of killings to make up for in a very short period of time.

The revenge tragedy “Titus” is Shakespeare’s most lampoonable work, but the key to spoofing it successfully is to stay firmly rooted in the text. Several other companies around town are currently taking liberties with Shakespearean models, but none comes close to the level of smart humor and biting parody that Buntport achieves. The Bug, for example, is presenting “Comedy of Errors,” but in acknowledgement of its difficult material, it ill-advisedly goes for broad, desperate stabs at humor that are accomplished only when its actors leap desperately out of character, or bulldoze the fourth wall. It comes across like children’s theater.

The mad geniuses at the Buntport, who adapted and directed the material as a collective, take a more sophisticated yet still-bawdy approach to “Titus,” with brilliant sight gags, silly songs and masterful prop work that has fun with the material while staying true to its lusty spirit. While the Bug’s cast doesn’t even seem to much like the material it is working with, the young Buntport players love theirs so fully they could eat it for lunch like a Chiron pie.

After I saw Buntport’s romp and stomp, I checked out Julie Taymor’s beautifully violent film starring Anthony Hopkins. The approaches could not be more different, but they have two things in common: They are both at times side-splittingly funny, and they both illuminate the text for the audience, the benchmark against which any Shakespearean production is judged.

Titus is a Roman general who has lost 22 sons in battle and upon his return offers the son of the imprisoned Goth queen Tamora as a ritual sacrifice. Titus defers the throne to Saturninus, who promptly weds the revenge-minded Tamora. Her sons rape Titus’ daughter Lavinia, and chop off her hands and tongue. They also murder Saturninus’ brother and frame two of Titus’ surviving sons. When offered his sons’ lives in exchange for a hand, Titus gladly lops his off, but in return is delivered only his sons’ heads. Thought delirious with madness, Titus fashions a tasty revenge: He kills Tamora’s sons Chiron and Demetrius and bakes them into meat pies that Tamora unknowingly eats with ketchup and mustard before meeting her own doom.

The collective has proudly chopped about 50 percent of the text, but still, how to keep the epic straight with a cast of five? The cast has fashioned an inspired cheat sheet. A large board shows the painted faces of all five actors in a row. Below each face are the names of the characters that actor portrays. Each name is accompanied by a pull-string lightbulb that Muni Kulasinghe flicks on and off at breakneck speed. So if you ever get confused, you can instantly see which character each actor is portraying. It’s a hoot to watch.

Buntport presents “Titus” in its otherwise empty warehouse space with only a Club Wagon van for a set. And when that van is a rockin’, someone comes a choppin’.

Colonna is P.S. McGoldstien, leader of the denim-based Van O’ Players minstrels. The van is painted on three sides to represent different settings, and the hole in the roof serves nicely as the pit where Lavinia’s lover meets his doom, complete with blood-smeared windows.

Another hollowed window serves as the opening for some puppet theater scenes that Taymor would love. Erik Edborg is a great puppeteer who plays the brothers Chiron and Demetrius as a ripped-out car radio and a gas can. When they get baked into singing meat pies, the gas spout (snout?) sticks out of the crust. Trust me: It’s funnier than it may sound.

The sight gags are nonstop: In the original, Tamora’s infidelity with Aaron is revealed when she delivers a black baby. Here her baby sports a tiny Chef Boy-ar-dee mustache that matches Aaron’s (Hannah Duggan). When Titus sacrifices his hand, it is smashed off in the van door. When a sword is drawn, it’s an oil dipstick.

And about that music. It’s ridiculous and bossa-nova saucy, like the play itself. It parodies the Carpenters (“Close to You”), the jazz standard “Beyond the Sea,” even Bon Jovi’s awful “Living on a Prayer.”

Just go see it. But if you don’t like it, and your heart grows full with the thirst for revenge, please forget that you heard about it from me.

-John Moore, May 15, 2002, Denver Post

Close-up of a man with large sideburns. He is bug-eyed and grimacing. In the background, out of focus, in the front of a yellow van.

Colorado Daily- Buntport makes laughingstock of Bard with tuneful “Titus Andronicus! The Musical”

Take some Shakespeare. Turn it upside down, inside out, slap it around, shake it like an unopened can of paint, hang it on the wall and make fun of its mamma.

That’s the approach Buntport Theater takes to what it calls “the Bard’s bloodiest play,” “Titus Andronicus.” What results is a crass, sardonic, no-holds-barred gorefest (stuffed with toe-tapping musical numbers) that is one of the funniest experiences you are likely to have on what the evening’s host refers to as “a flight on that big bird called theatre – with an R, E, of course.”

The show takes place in Buntport’s bare-walled performance space, occupied only by a massive Club Wagon XLT van which serves as the surprisingly versatile set, a player piano and tape deck, and a light-bulb-studded tote board, the last of which helps us keep track of who’s playing whom in each scene.  A drop-dead-funny cast of five, who present themselves as the traveling “Professor P.S. McGoldstien Van-O-Players,” portray the near-infinitude of characters in “Titus.” They aid their cause with the help of a stripped-down text crammed with cheesy gags, clever no-budget costumes and props, and a flock of quick-change costume pieces that help to keep the players straight – barely.

A summary of the play’s gruesome and complex plot, thought to be Shakespeare’s first effort at tragedy, would eat up too much space. Besides, Buntport’s hilarious program captures its absurdities nicely. Its mélange of high-flown eloquence, revenge, murder, rape, insanity, dismemberment, and cannibalism has rendered it unproduceable by all but the hardiest and most grimly insightful of directors. Of course, this makes it perfect fodder for parody.

Each performer takes on a handful of roles with relish – and a great deal of ketchup, which is splattered about profusely as the bloodshed swells (updated as expirations progress on a handy “Death Toll” chalkboard). Brian Colonna, a bundle of energy despite undergoing an emergency appendectomy only days before the opening, sets the tone with joyful, manic bombast as Titus, and with wimpy delicacy as the hapless suitor Bassanius. Erik Edborg scores as a wheezy emperor, Titus’ wistfully dense would-be-hero son Lucius, and as the voices and hands powering the evil brothers Chiron and Demetrius, who are puppets incarnated from a car radio and a gas can, respectively.

Droll Erin Rollman handles her manifold acting duties with style and wit, especially as Titus’s befuddled brother Marcus, and as Titus’s nemesis, the Goth queen Tamora. Hannah Duggan is brilliantly funny, doubling as the evil Aaron the Moor, complete with Snidely Whiplash moustache, and as Titus’s doomed daughter Lavinia, who, lopped of tongue and hands, she still gamely serves as a mute and melancholy Ann Miller. Tasteless? Sure. Funny? You bet.

A new and welcome Buntport participant is gangly Muni Kulasinghe, who runs the musical portion of the show and fills in as any number of incidental characters whose demise is imminent. His profusion of idiotic impersonations adds immeasurably to the show’s bounty of belly laughs. Classical music lovers will find his baleful plucking of the “Dies Irae” on mandolin a howl. Kudos also to the troupe’s often-overlooked backstage members, Matt Petraglia and SamAnTha Schmitz, who keep the comic havoc flowing.

“Titus” gleefully mocks the Bard and all who have made him into the playhouse’s sacred beast. In an area where “serious,” big-budget productions draw crowds and media attention, Buntport proves that entertaining theater (or theatre) can be composed of nothing more than a minimum of stage effects, a powerful collection of talent, and an abundance of imagination. “Titus – The Musical” deserves packed houses for the remainder of its run.

-Brad Weismann, May 14, 2002, Colorado Daily