It sounds like a classic improv genre mashup: Let’s take Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and do it in a pseudo-Elizabethan style! And if Commedia Beauregard’s “Bard Fiction” were a short sketch, that might be great. Or, if they really reinvestigated the source material, as they did with their holiday cult hit, “A Klingon Christmas Carol,” where the Klingon emphasis on honor over charity took center stage, then you’d at least have a fresh approach to the material.
But this show — first staged in a 2012 production that I didn’t see — never gets beyond the joke of the initial premise. At nearly 2 1/2 hours, it’s also as self-indulgent as some of Tarantino’s own work. There are some ingratiating performances, particularly from Josh Zagoren’s Vincenzio de la Vega (a stand-in for John Travolta’s gormless hitman, bad wig and all), and Steven Royce as his fearsome partner, Julius Winfield. But despite some decent fight sequences and a very funny take on the twist contest from “Pulp Fiction,” Christopher Kidder-Mostrom’s direction also doesn’t take very many chances.
Elizabethan England was rife with its own hit squads — scholars still argue over what actually happened to Christopher Marlowe, for example. So the opportunity to fully meld Tarantino’s stylized violence and pop-culture references with the earlier era are there. But it takes more than dropping lines like “To flee, or not to flee” to make Tarantino’s tale feel like a good fit for the setting. Writers Ben Tallen, Aaron Greer and Brian Watson-Jones seem to have spent so much time trying to make Tarantino’s script work in a sorta-Shakespeare vernacular that they forgot to address the big question of why it should be set in that period, as opposed to, say, shogunate Japan.
Hardcore Tarantino fans will probably enjoy this show’s familiarity to some extent. But “Bard Fiction” feels like an improv set that outwears its welcome.
REVIEW: “Bard Fiction” by Commedia Beauregard
2 STARS
Through Aug. 2 at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.; $30 at 312-487-1893 or cbtheatre.org.
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Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.