A Casual, No-Frills Shakespeare Production Played for Laughs

Funk music filled the theater, and suddenly the stage was crowded with bumping-and-grinding celebrities, who had cast off their star personas for a reading of William Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Among the most unrecognizable of the cast was Tom Hanks as Bottom, the wannabe thespian-turned-mule.

The two-time Oscar winner strutted onstage, a white bandana covering his head, trousers belted high above his waist to reveal an unusual choice of footwear: white socks and sandals. He moved with bravado and spoke with a throaty Bulgarian-esque accent, rendering all his lines comic.

(After the show, Hanks explained that the play is set in Greece, so, he chose to depict a modern-day Greek tourist. Rita Wilson, who played the fairy queen Titania, had another explanation for her husband’s choice of accent: “He’s doing my dad!”).

The Monday night show at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood has become an annual tradition since its beginning 13 years ago. Each year, Hanks and Wilson, the event co-hosts, rally their friends for a one-night-only reading of a Shakespeare play to benefit the Shakespeare Festival/LA. Tickets, which range from $250 to $2,500 each, always sell out.

The mood is casual. There is no set and no costumes (white socks and sandals notwithstanding), and actors don’t memorize their lines. (Christina Applegate as Hermia and Peter Krause as Lysander earned hearty laughs Monday night for missing cues and bungling speeches.) This year, the cast got together for one five-hour rehearsal. “Then they sit around and figure out how to outdo each other,” said Ben Donenberg, the festival’s founder and producing artistic director.

On Monday, Hanks and Martin Short, who played Puck, were the clear crowd favorites. Short wore his hair standing on end until the joke wore thin. Then he pulled his T-shirt halfway over his head, let his ears protrude and read some lines as Katharine Hepburn and others as John Wayne. Occasionally, he took on the odd mannerisms of his beloved “SCTV” character Ed Grimley. “If one thing wasn’t working,” Short said, after the show, “I’d change it.”

Hanks, who last performed Shakespeare seriously in the late 1970s in Cleveland, said the annual reading is as much fun for the cast as it is for the audience. “All we do is laugh from beginning to end.”

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Earnest Fans of a Fantasy Man

On Monday night, a group of women realized a fantasy outside the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills.

Some had traveled several hundred miles for this: a smile, maybe a chat and a picture.

“I’m shaking right now,” said 32-year-old Amparo del Aguila, who had just met the object of her affection: Colin Firth.

Firth, in town to promote “The Importance of Being Earnest,” had come to the British Academy of Film and Television Los Angeles screening of the movie, where he met Aguila and her fellow fans.

“I’m not ashamed to like him,” Aguila said. “He’s the universal man that everyone wants.”

And the encounter? Firth signed Aguila’s production notes for the movie. “He’s everything I thought he was.”

Aguila isn’t a celebrity hound, she said--only Firth has won her heart. At work, a Palo Alto marketing and communications company, colleagues are curious about her obsession. “Like, ‘You’re taking time off to do what?’”

Aguila was trailing Firth’s “Earnest” junket to New York, where the movie is set to premiere Monday, and had taken two weeks off from work to make the pilgrimage. Fellow fans, Janice Charleboix, 53, from Portland, and Kristi Bowman, 42, of Seattle, had also come just for the screening. And to get in, they’d joined the sponsoring British film and TV academy.

The fans span a wide demographic. “There are 75- to 80-year-old women who are learning to use the Internet so they can learn more about Colin,” said Charleboix. And 16-year-old girls like him, too, she added.

With other stars, “you can get disappointed by their personal life,” said Aguila, adding, “not that they owe us anything.”

At the Q&A; after the screening, one woman in the audience asked how Firth felt about a couple of fantasy scenes in the movie. “Did I really participate in any of the fantasies?” asked Firth. Exclaimed the woman: “You did in mine.”

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Stars Getting Into the Groove

What two settings give you the best chance of spotting famous faces in Los Angeles? One is any LAX gate boarding a New York nonstop flight, and the other is the latest high-priced concert by a baby boomer rock legend. Into the latter category falls the Paul McCartney concert on Saturday at Staples Center, where the crowd included Jack Nicholson (bearded, and grooving to “Fool on the Hill” like a hippie in full flashback mode), Sly Stallone, John Cusack, Pat Boone (who was way off the beat as he clapped along), Ted Danson and even Sir Paul’s friendly old rival, the reclusive Brian Wilson (who appeared at times to doze but was revived by those neo-Beach Boy harmonies from “Back in the U.S.S.R.”).

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Sightings

On Friday, singer Nikka Costa, Natasha Gregson-Wagner and Shiva Rose eyeing the wares at makeup artist Victoria Jackson’s new salon Lola on South Robertson ... earlier that day, comic actors Orlando Jones and Jeremy Piven sharing a table at the Newsroom Cafe on North Robertson.

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Times staff writer Geoff Boucher contributed to this column. City of Angles runs Tuesday through Friday. E-mail angles@latimes.com