The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) embodies one of comedy’s most essential impulses: the adolescent urge to take a baseball bat to the culturally revered. A mix of pratfalls, puns, willful misreadings of names and dialogue, clunky female impersonations, clean-cut ribaldry, and broad burlesque. The gung-ho vitality is impossible to resist. The conversion of the histories into a football game is very funny. So is a rap version of Othello. Hamlet truly soars and allows the actors to come into their own as manic clowns.