The Rochester Shakespeare Players’ “SaMeSeXsHaKeSpEaRe” was a hit at last year’s festival, and if you’ve ever wanted to see
Macbeth in a red power suit and heels, or Hamlet as the original emo teen, you
have one more chance to see the 2014 edition, on September 26. This is a
nicely paced, 45-minute tour through familiar scenes from the plays mentioned
above, plus “Twelfth Night” and a sonnet, with the genders reversed
(“Macbeth’s” Weird Sisters are now Weird Homeless People) or otherwise
scrambled. This approach doesn’t especially enhance Shakespeare’s language
and characterizations, but on the other hand it does them no harm, and the
gender-bending can be fun to watch. There are some
engaging performances here, especially from Melyssa
Hall and Katherine Sanford as Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth and, in an encounter
between Olivia and Viola from “Twelfth Night,” Alec Powell as
Olivia and Rusty Allen as Viola (playing a woman playing a man dressed as a
woman … I think I got that right).
You can catch “SaMeSeXsHaKeSpEaRe” again on Friday,
September 26, at The TheatreROCS Stage at Xerox
Auditorium. 10:30 p.m. $9.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2014.
