Summer Shakespeare and a Final Comic-Con Callback

Actors' Gang Summer Shakespeare in the Park, 2023 Edition

Every weekend in August, the Actors’ Gang Theater in Culver City (adjacent to West L.A.) mounts a fun, free Shakespeare in the Park show that’s family friendly and usually a mashup between a Shakespeare play and other familiar pop culture characters/properties.

We’ve seen every production since it began in 2006, initially taking our kids. Past productions include “Harry Potter Hamlet,” “Much Ado About Avengers,” “Toy Story Tempest,” “Mighty Morphin Midsummer's Night Dream,” and “Titus the Clownicus.” They’re about an hour in length, with plenty of comedy, audience/children participation, and frequent musical/dance interludes. (Until a few years ago, every production included a Michael Jackson “Thriller” dance sequence featuring the whole company.) And like most Actors’ Gang productions, they’re usually edgy, with layers of comedy to entertain both children and adults. The productions use much of Shakespeare’s language, with the Shakespeare characters cleverly melded with their pop culture counterparts.

This year’s show was “Much Ado About Pooh,” as Christopher Robin, Pooh, Tigger and Eeyore visit Owl and his family in the Hundred Acre Wood. For those familiar with the play, Pooh and Piglet fill the roles of Claudio and Hero (as best friends rather than romantic partners), while Tigger and Rabbit are Benedick and Beatrice. (Eeyore plays the role of the troublemaking Don John.) Though there is trickery and deceit, by the end of the show, balance is restored, and the show’s narrator concludes with a short lesson about the importance of communication, forgiveness and understanding.

As I said, it’s a fun, entertaining show—nearby businesses and Culver City are often name-checked. And at this year’s show, the masquerade scene opens with a dance to “Pink Shoe Laces” that has recently become a popular TikTok dance challenge (I’ve known the song since I was a kid, since we had it in the house on a 45 record!). Prior to the show, they also told the audience that the day’s secret word was “mischief” and that everyone should scream when someone uttered it.

It’s great fun for children and adults—in fact, even though our kids feel they’ve outgrown it, my wife and I continue to go every year. Afterwards, we had a lovely late breakfast down the street at a restaurant in the flatiron-stye Culver Hotel, now a boutique hotel and historic landmark. (Since the MGM lot (now Sony) is located nearby, it housed many Hollywood stars in its heyday. It also was where the little people cast in the Wizard of Oz stayed.)

The show runs Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. through August 27.

I should note that Actor Tim Robbins, one of the founders of the Actors’ Gang and currently its artistic director, was on hand the Sunday we attended as well. He provided a welcome, using the occasion to express support for the SAG-AFTRA strike. Robbins founded the Actors’ Gang in 1981 while a student at UCLA, during a period I was there. In fact, my now-wife and I caught many of their shows when they performed in other parts of L.A., including Hollywood, before settling in Culver City. In January, they re-mounted a play they had performed at UCLA, “Ubu the King”—after the show, I was able to chat with Robbins briefly and tell him I remembered the original UCLA production!

REVIEW: Ubu the King

I’ve mentioned the Actors’ Gang in the past, a theater group based in Culver City. In addition to presenting edgy, experimental theater, they also do extensive work in the community, including youth workshops and a fun summer family-friendly free Shakespeare in the Park program. (We’ve attended every Shakespeare in the Park performance since its start, taking our kids when they were children. Though they seem to have outgrown it, my wife and I still attend every year!)

Founded in 1981, after operating primarily in various theaters in Hollywood over the years, in 2005 the Actors’ Gang moved to the Ivy Substation in downtown Culver City, a historic landmark that once stored power equipment for nearby electric railways and was converted to a theater. The venue anchors one end of the city's downtown and played a role in the re-gentrification of the neighborhood—it’s also a few blocks from the Culver Studios, which I’ve also highlighted in past posts.

One of the founders and primary movers of the Actors’ Gang is actor and director Tim Robbins, who is very active and hands on with the troupe. Robbins' years at UCLA briefly overlapped my own time there and, in fact, he mounted a production of “Ubu the King" when I was a student there. Alas, I did not see that production, so when I heard that they were staging it again to mark the Actors’ Gang’s 40th anniversary, I had to see it.

“Ubu the King” is about a Polish nobleman whose wife convinces him to murder the king and take the crown for himself. He promptly becomes a despot, proceeding to consolidate power and accumulate the kingdom's wealth by exploiting, terrorizing and even executing his subjects, including his noblemen and landowners; though he kills most of the king’s family, the assassinated son partners with allies in Russia to exact revenge. This is the basic plot, but it does not do justice to the absurdist and low brow comedy, and the use of devices like toy action figures and strobe lights that Robbins employs to highlight the anarchic and chaotic tone of the play. This is very much guerrilla theater—at one point, during the strobe light sequence, I realized that several in the company running around the theater were nude!

Written in 1896 by Alfred Jarry, the play is profane, scatological and absurdist, and considered a precursor to the modernist and absurdist theater movement—indeed, a riot reportedly ensued at the play’s first performance. It's a sort of absurdist version of "Macbeth" and other Shakespeare plays such as "Hamlet" and "King Lear." (The Actors’ Gang is also heavily influenced by the commedia dell'arte style of acting.)

I have another tenuous connection to the production—a close college friend of mine was in in Robbins’ original production at UCLA that I didn’t see.  Just a few years back, he told me that shortly after Robbins graduated (around 1981), he called my friend and asked him if he wanted to appear in a new production that summer. My friend told me that he passed on the invitation, partly because he already had a job lined up for that summer as a theater usher (in retrospect, of course, he wonders now what he was thinking!).

Fast forward to the show from last week. The theater is very small and seats only about 100 people. Robbins actually showed up before the start of the show, mingling and worked the bar a little.

Afterwards, in the theater’s tiny lobby/foyer, Robbins walked by me but seemed to be speaking to people he knew, so I didn’t feel comfortable trying to break in. After we exited the theater and looked back, however, my wife noticed that Robbins had come out on his own. My wife had wanted to rave to him about an Actors’ Gang show he produced in 1991 (when they were in a theater in Hollywood) called “Klub,” which she really loved. So we ran back and spent a few minutes speaking with him—he was lovely and effusive.

When I mentioned my friend’s story, he asked his name—I qualified by saying I wasn’t sure he’d remember him, but indeed he did. He told me to tell my friend to encourage him to attend and then say hi to him after the show. In fact, he told me that he had invited a bunch of people from that production he was still in touch with (who he referred to as “the original UBUists”) to the show and they had had a mini-reunion.

The following day, while going through the program, I noticed there was a list of “the original UBUists”—and found my friend’s name on the list!

Harry Potter Hamlet

Every weekend in August, the Actor's Gang in Culver City puts on a free Shakespeare production in the park for families, usually a family friendly one-hour production of a Shakespeare play mashed up with another pop culture touchstone—with plenty of comedy (for both kids and their parents), music, some pointed political satire, and shout outs and plugs for Culver City.

This year's show was one of their best—"Harry Potter Hamlet"—and, spoiler alert, in this production, everyone survives and learns a life lesson, thanks to the magic of the wizards and audience participation!

Here are some photos from the production.

REVIEWS: "Romeo and Juliet: Monsters in Love"

For the past six summers, the Actors’ Gang—a theatre ensemble company based in Culver City, California—has produced a free mid-day show in August for families.

The shows are liberally adapted from Shakespeare, made to be kid-and-family friendly with an emphasis on fun and earthy comedy, and feature the Actors’ Gang trademark commedia dell'arte style of acting. While the adaptations are greatly abridged, the shows nevertheless preserve portions of the original text, meaning that the shows are often in verse and can never be accused of “talking down” to its audience. Indeed, the shows include plenty of humor and modern-day references as a wink to parents and adults.

The Actors’ Gang is famous for its guerrilla stye of theater and the ensemble set the tone early for the series by hilariously reducing “Titus Andronicus”—one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest R-rated plays—to a feud involving clowns, its bloodiest parts presented as a slow-mo whipped cream pie fight. Other recent adaptations include “King O’Leary,” a presentation of King Lear brought to California’s Gold Rush days and “The Taming of the Shrew.”

This year’s show, currently running through the end of August, is “Romeo and Juliet: Monsters in Love,” about the star-crossed love between a vampire (Romeo) and a zombie (Juliet). Their families are made up of a cornucopia of monsters and one of the highlights of the show is the cast dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” during the masquerade ball where Romeo meets Juliet. As always, the show is full of laughs, punctuated by fun musical stingers and cues.

The show is intended for families and children, but is just as entertaining for adults. As I do every year, I highly recommend it—this year’s show ranks among the best, I think, of the productions.

“Romeo and Juliet: Monsters in Love” is presented free of charge in Media Park, adjacent to the Actors’ Gang’s theatre at The Ivy Substation Saturdays and Sundays at 11am, August 6 – August 28, 2011. Running time approximately 45 minutes.

See This

UPDATE: My family and I saw this show on Saturday, August 23, and had a grand ol' time—we even spotted Actor's Gang director Tim Robbins was spotted after the show!

When I attended UCLA in the early '80s, there was a real confluence of talent in the theatre arts program. Since then many of the actors who I saw in theatre productions there have found varying level success in Hollywood. These include performers like screenwriter/director Shane Black (creator of the Lethal Weapon movie franchise), charactor actor Lee Arenberg, and actor Jack Black. Given this deep pool of talent, I developed a real appreciation for live theatre when I was at UCLA.

Also among this group was actor/director/producer Tim Robbins who, after UCLA, went on to found the Actor's Gang theatre group, many of whose productions I have seen over the years. Several years ago, the group moved to a new facility local to me in Culver City, so it's been a treat to rediscover them. (Recent productions I've seen are "Gulliver's Travels" and "Klub," the latter of which I saw when it was originally mounted back in 1992.) I've been impressed by how active they are in the local community, particularly in reaching out to youth through shows and acting campus.

One of their regular activities in this area has been free summer productions they mount for families and children. I saw last year's production, "Titus the Clownicus," a comedic adaptation of one of the bloodiest of Shakespeare's blood plays, "Titus Andronicus." It was hilarious, and like most Actor's Gang productions, edgy, with plenty of layers of comedy to entertain both children and adults.

This year's production is "King O'Leary," an adaptation of "King Lear," set during the days of California's Gold Rush. The show runs Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m., August 9 – 31, on the front lawn of the Actor's Gang home at the historic Ivy Substation in Culver City. (The address and directions can be found here.)

Below is a promotional video from last year's "Titus the Clownicus."