Before the premiere of Hinman Production Company’s latest show this weekend, the sounds of laughter and the opening song from “The Lion King” wafted through the doors. Then, silence, until a loud female voice yelled out, word by word, “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. And they’re like, it’s better than yours,” with the entire cast repeating Kelis’ immortal words verbatim.
This is just one of the warm-ups that HPC’s cast uses to get themselves ready for their performances. This weekend, it’s for “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).”
“The Complete Works” is a parody of all of Shakespeare’s plays written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield for The Reduced Shakespeare Company and was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987. All of Shakespeare’s plays are mashed up into a fourth wall-breaking romp that offers a contemporary take on classic plays. “Othello” is rapped, Shakespeare’s historical plays are reenacted as a football game and “Titus Andronicus” is a cooking show.
While the original script has only three characters, director Samantha Mooney, a senior majoring in chemistry, expanded the script to include nine characters to make room for more actors. But the more the merrier, as the entire cast came together to create a hilarious 90 minutes of theater. The show is laugh-out-loud, audience interactive and refreshing for any student who’s studied “Romeo and Juliet” too many times. In one standout moment, Jordan Gagnon, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering, parodied Ophelia’s drowning in “Hamlet” by pouring a water bottle into his open mouth.
The long rehearsal hours and process of putting a show together facilitated a sense of camaraderie, which led to a night full of laughter and fun. To prepare for a comedy, Mooney had the cast play improvisation games like the ones from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” Mooney also used other exercises to bond the cast, like asking each cast member to take a turn holding an object while talking about something bad that happened that day and how he or she won’t let it affect the rehearsal.
“I couldn’t have asked for better people to work with,” said Kristen Mulvena, a sophomore majoring in psychology. “These are the best people in Binghamton.”
Between designing and creating the set, the entire crew came together. In HPC, members of both productions in each semester help build and take apart the sets at the end of each show’s run. This past Saturday, everyone came together at 11 a.m. to build the set, painting panels and setting up the light and sound.
“It’s organized chaos to build the set,” said Bridget Egan, a senior in the Decker School of Nursing.
Egan and Andrew Watters, a junior majoring in electrical engineering, are the two set directors for “The Complete Works.” Egan and Watters came in one month before the show to meet with Mooney to review their vision for the set designs.
“It was a collaborative process,” Gagnon said. “It wasn’t as constrained, it was more free and allowed us to get the creative juices flowing.”
For any student looking to take a break from work and see something a little different and a lot hysterical, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” will be holding performances this weekend in the Hinman Commons at 8 p.m Friday and 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $3 at the door.