STAGE REVIEW : Pacific Ensemble’s ‘Wives of Windsor’ Lacks Merriment

“Let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English,” says Sir Hugh Evans (Jim Marilley) in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Pardon me, but was he talking to the members of the Pacific Theatre Ensemble? In the name of making merry with the “Merry Wives,” the ensemble creates mayhem. Some of it works, much of it doesn’t.

This is another concept Shakespeare and potentially a good one, too: A contemporary “Merry Wives” set in Venice, Calif., a stone’s throw from the tip of the Santa Monica Pier where this production takes place. Falstaff (Robert Evan Collins) is a rogue and a beach bum. Pistol’s a black dude; Nym’s a Chicano. But like so many other concepts, this one goes too far and not far enough. It suffers from a certain timidity, as if something impelled director D. Paul Yeuell to stop just short of letting the production bounce off the boardwalk.

In an ebullient, windblown setting such as this, it’s imperative to let things rip. Excess is easier to forgive than shyness. The place is noisy but life-affirming. There’s a ready, appreciative audience among the gazers, fishermen, lovers, children and grandparents out for a weekend stroll. The free show’s 250 chairs are quickly filled, even if not always with the same bodies. But the coming and going in the course of a performance seems to bother no one and there are always other bodies looking on, ready to plop into an empty seat.

Appropriately, then, this is Shakespeare painted in beach colors: pink, purple, orange, aqua, yellow and lime green. Thomas Buderwitz did the modest unit set that includes corrugated sheeting and Cyclone fencing among its fanciful materials. Andrew Gordon has composed (and performs) music and songs with lyrics by “D.P. Yeuell and Wm. Shakespeare.”

None of the songs are listed by title, but titles can be easily arranged: A “Bride’s Lament” for the unhappy Ann Page (a charmless Lisa Steele); a “Husband’s Lament” for the unhappy Frank Ford (Robert Jacobs in the production’s best show of farce); a rap song by Nym (Ruben Amavizca) and Pistol (James Tyrone Wallace II)--and a women’s chorus to a reggae beat that engages Mistresses Page (Del Appleby), Ford (Synthia L. Hardy) and Quickly (Melissa Weber, the event’s sexiest entry in spiraling beehive, garter belt and merry widow--a puzzling get-up even for Venice, but probably costumer Rhonda Earick’s private joke).

It is this kind of left turn that, while amusing in itself, derails logic and keeps the play from benefitting from conceptual follow-through. Lines like George Page’s “Come gentlemen, we have grilled mahi-mahi to dinner” or Mistress Page’s “Your husband’s coming hither with all the big shots in Windsor” or Falstaff’s answer to Brook’s “How did it go?” (“A bummer, man”) lose their bite for being so arbitrarily forced into their context. Talk of “smackers,” “limos” and “producers” has the same effect: funny for a moment but not sustainable.

Perhaps the show’s most accomplished performance comes from Frank Collison as the witless Slender, reluctant suitor to Ann Page, not only because he is an actors’ actor who understands character, but because he is called upon to transgress period the least.

David Nathan has fun with Simple, which he performs in a Marxist vein--Harpo Marx, that is, with whistle, kazoo, goggles, a flying ace cap on his head and no words. But Loren Lester’s Dr. Caius speaks with such a fractured French accent, that it is virtually impossible to follow what he’s up to. For the rest of the actors, they provide energetic, serviceable performances. (This is not a company of second-raters.) Next to Collison, however, only Jacobs in the dual role of Ford and Brook really understands how to go about this kind of broadness.

So one is both grateful for this first co-venture between the City of Santa Monica and the Ensemble and aware that it still needs some fine-tuning. Aside from the development of a show with more of a sense of its own final destination, there are more pragmatic matters to be taken care of, such as the placement of a banner at the entrance to the pier to let people know there is a play about to take place at the other end. And when the actors emerge from their improvised dressing rooms and walk past the audience to the stage, let it be not a walk (as it is now) but a slam-bang parade.

A little well-placed panache (and city assistance) never hurts.

On the west end of the Santa Monica Pier, Fridays, 5 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Until Sept. 10. Free; (213) 306-3943.