Riffs on Shakespeare: Otra Tempestad
Teatro Buendia
The National Post

A fine vocal instrument, that of the 80-year old William Hutt, was celebrated on Sunday afternoon at the Winter Garden. With Diane d'Aquila as compere, this occasion was more fluent and mostly less sticky than such tributes often are. Colleagues and admirers paid homage, told stories, even sang songs (“Mad About the Boy”, with an additional male lyric previously unheard.)

There were videos of Hutt himself, revisiting past homes and enjoying his present one. He finally took the stage himself, to respond to what had been said with a presumably impromptu wit that validated the anecdotes. Much was justifiably made of his appearance on a Canadian stamp, in his last great role of Prospero.

So it was appropriate to repair to Buddies in Bad Times for Otra Tempestad, presented by Teatro Buendia from Cuba, and probably the first production of The Tempest in which the first character named in the program is Hamlet. Macbeth and Shylock also appear; and so, apparently, in an earlier version, did Othello, though he seems to have been lost in transit.

They share the stage, and the Afro-Caribbean island, with a bearded dictatorial Prospero, a lusciously bare- breasted female Ariel (well acted, too, by Giselle Navaroli), and a Miranda who falls for Caliban though her father wants her to marry Macbeth.

It's Shylock who snitches on the lovers, and he's sneaky throughout. He also chants, wears a prayer shawl, and is generally more regrettable than his Venetian prototype. Fidel-Prospero has his faults but, as yet another Shakesperean character once put it, "I fear there will a worse come in his place." Macbeth, who deposes him, turns out to be a cannibal.

Throwing Shakespeare wide open can be a fruitful idea, and the local colour and local music make Flora Lauten's production fun, but there seems little point to doing it beyond doing it. There is invention but no true inventiveness; and the audience, primed by scene-by-scene projected synopses, merely waits for each episode to give way to the next.