Shakespeare Surprise at the Strand

It’s Shakespeare with boom boxes, tube tops, sunglasses, jeans, T-shirts and cut-off jackets in Pacific Theatre Ensemble’s production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” opening Friday--with free admission--on the Santa Monica Pier. “It’s kind of a cross between the circus and ‘The Honeymooners,’ said director D. Paul Yeuell, “a big, bawdy romp.”

The piece was financed in part by the city of Santa Monica, which awarded the Venice-based company a $15,000 grant to “put on a Shakespeare show on the pier.” The alliance, Yeuell hopes, will mark the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the city, “which has been working with fine arts, supporting painters and sculptors. Now they’re turning to performing arts--and we happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

The open-air setting, Yeuell believes, “dictates a theatrical idiom. We knew we couldn’t do it in doublets and tights, stand-and-deliver kind of Shakespeare. We really had to kick it up. ‘Merry Wives’ was written about people in Shakespeare’s own time: not about kings and queens and fairies, but really working-class kinds of people. And the pier had that real urban-setting feel.”

Along with the modern dress, Yeuell (who was one of the creators of PTE’s “June Second” and who promises his staging “will make sense to folks not initiated to Shakespeare”) has done a little fiddling with the text.

“For the most part, it’s prose--with some verse,” he noted. “And some of that verse was crying out to be a song.” Yeuell obliged with numbers in reggae, rap, rock, rhythm and blues, “even a gospel number. It’s not entirely arbitrary, because there are some songs in the script. You know, the play came from three or four sources; Shakespeare took those existing stories and came up with an eclectic theater piece. I think he would’ve approved of what we’ve done.”

THEATER FILE: Charles Arthur, the new artistic director of Theatre 40, will stage Elizabeth Diggs’ family drama “Close Ties,” opening this weekend--with William Gibson’s romantic comedy, “Two For The Seesaw,” following Aug. 21 . . . Closing the season at Bilingual Foundation for the Arts’ Theatre/Teatro is Spanish playwright Ramon Del Valle-Inclan’s “Divinas Palabras.” The Spanish-language version opens Sept. 29, followed by the English-language world premiere Oct. 6.

Paul Linke, whose one-man “Time Flies When You’re Alive” recently aired on HBO, will reprise the stage version Wednesday at the Santa Monica Playhouse in a one-night benefit for the St. Joseph’s Restaurant Project (designed to feed 200 people a day) . . . The Fabulous Deborah Spector Players headline a benefit for Theatre To Go, Friday at Gio’s.

Women in Theatre has elected a new board after the en bloc resignation of the entire old one, a move designed, said president Dorothy Lyman, “so I could rebuild it with nine women I felt could move WIT forward in a new direction.” The new board members are Lyman, producers Cate Caplin and Diane Miller, Nancy McFarlane (managing director, Odyssey Theatre), writers Hollis Evans and Terry Zaneski, actors Ann Walker and Janet Aspers, treasurer Tracy Pulliam.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Howard Korder’s “Boys’ Life”--a modern tale about a trio of infantile post-college buddies and the women in their lives--is playing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Said Sylvie Drake in The Times: “To the degree that Korder wanted to show how relationships in the 1980s exist at an alarming rate of dysfunction, he succeeded. But within a strident and alarmingly dysfunctional play.”

From Clifford Gallo in the Herald Examiner: “Under David Beaird’s high-powered direction, Korder’s exuberantly vulgar and insightful dialogue is delivered with sustained comic and caustic authority by a top-notch cast, led by the irrepressible Jon Cryer.”

The Orange County Register’s Thomas O’Connor found Korder “a witty writer, with an ear for the sad subtexts beneath the bravado of young men, stubbing their toes--and other portions of anatomy--against the first generation of post-liberation women . . . The play’s blank spaces are emphasized in Beaird’s shrilly-pitched (staging.)”

And from T.H. McCulloh in Drama-Logue: “The three men and five women in Korder’s fast-paced drama--none very likable--come from nowhere and go nowhere. Like a bad dream with comic timing, their struggle to fend off adulthood contains some frightening truths, but they’re not in any coherent context.”