Focus on the friar finds a tragedy’s funny bone

Forget the “Romeo and Juliet” you learned in high school. At the Tamarind Theatre in Hollywood, four-letter words fly across the stage, many launched from the lips of a priest. Romeo lustfully kisses his mother-in-law. American cultural icons -- Columbo, Barney Fife -- hijack entire scenes. A doofus Romeo and a sarcastic Juliet vie to sing the last word in their famous suicide scene.

It’s all a part of the bawdy, breezy musical spoof “The People vs. Friar Laurence, the Man Who Killed Romeo and Juliet.”

The production is as irreverent toward traditional religion as it is toward traditional Shakespeare. A trombone-playing God appears in the second act, for instance, comically bandying about lines from such ersatz books of the Bible as “Galoshes” and “Fallopians.”

It’s something of a surprise that the collaborators on “People vs. Friar Laurence” met at church. But author-director Ron West and Phil Swann, his collaborator on the score and musical director, met at the Church of the Valley, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) congregation in Van Nuys, where they sing in the choir. After wowing a church-related party with their prowess at a musical parlor game, they decided to write a musical together.

Later, after church services one Sunday in 2002, West told Swann that the famous Chicago-based comedy troupe Second City had called him, wondering if he might want to write a modern musical version of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Isn’t that called ‘West Side Story’?” Swann replied.

“Not what I have in mind,” West answered. He was envisioning a criminal interrogation of the fretting friar who secretly married the ill-fated couple and gave Juliet a sleeping potion.

West found some of the friar’s lines “creepy and semi-erotic.” And the more he thought about the original, “the plot holes that I could make fun of started to add up,” he recalled.

West, 44, has a long history as a performer, director and writing teacher with the original Second City company in Chicago, and has worked in L.A. offshoots since he moved here in 1994. Best known for a recurring role on “3rd Rock From the Sun” as the physicist Dr. Strudwick, he’s also a director of the live news parody show “Big News,” Thursdays at ImprovOlympic West.

The Second City “Romeo and Juliet” offer fell apart about a year ago, West said. But he and Swann, a former musical theater actor who’s now a pop and country songwriter, kept working.

For reference, West used the copy of Shakespeare’s play that he had originally read in high school in Middlefield, Ohio -- complete with his teenage notes. His background also includes the experience of playing Rosencrantz -- or was it Guildenstern? -- in one of the most famous Shakespearean takeoffs, Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” when he was a student at Kent State University in Ohio.

Although Swann had never written a musical, he came up with pop, rock, folk and bossa nova riffs for the show almost instantaneously.

“It’s so much fun,” Swann said. “In country music, I work with strict parameters, because I’m trying to get on the radio. Here I have the ability to go to far more interesting places, to even go out on a recitative. It’s all about telling a story. And the more ridiculous the lyric, the more serious I wanted the song.”

West and Swann mounted a workshop version of “Friar Laurence” last June at the Improv on Melrose. David Castellani, who played several roles in the workshop and had worked with West at the Open Fist Theatre, was so taken with the material that he decided to produce a full staging with $22,000 he inherited.

“The People vs. Friar Laurence” opened at the Tamarind in mid-January and drew critical acclaim. F. Kathleen Foley called it “a fast-moving freight train of an entertainment that carries a full load of laughs” in a Times review.

West acknowledges that the production is bare-bones. The actors wear contemporary clothes. Props are few. “There could be a picture of this production next to ‘shoestring’ in the dictionary,” he says.

West defends the impecunious look of the show on aesthetic as well as budgetary grounds. “I could have more fun with an imaginary sword than with the real thing,” he said.

However, he wants the show to have a life in larger theaters where it might pay off financially, and those productions might require bigger production values. He’s hoping to snag the interest of Shakespeare festivals.

Many of the rehearsals were held in a Church of the Valley hall. Has the show’s wildly irreverent tone created any flak at the church? Not at all, Swann said. “It’s by no means a right-wing church. Most of the members are in show business.”

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‘The People vs. Friar Laurence, the Man Who Killed Romeo and Juliet’

Where: Tamarind Theatre,

5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood

When: Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.

Ends: March 7

Price: $20

Info: (323) 465-7980

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes