Review: 'The Merry Wives of Windsor Cove' gives Shakespeare a 'Beach Blanket Bingo' makeover

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred “The Merry Wives of Windsor Cove,” a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at UC Irvine’s New Swan Shakespeare Festival, relocates the comedy to a Southern California beach town in the 1950s.The surf’s up, a chocolate-covered-banana stand is hopping and a washed-up Elvis-like rock star named Johnny Falstaff is trailing chaos.Those merry wives aren’t actually all that merry about the state of their marriages.

Margaret Page (Sonya Cooke) has lost all patience with her grinning, gadabout husband, George (Evan Lugo), who floats through life as though it were as lighthearted an affair as “Beach Blanket Bingo.” Margaret’s best friend, Alice Ford (Sarah Hentges), has more serious problems with her jealous husband, Frank (Abel Garcia), who suspects infidelity whenever she leaves the house.When Falstaff (Wyn Moreno), motivated by avarice and a mania for cuckolding, comes a-wooing, sending identical letters to Margaret and Alice, the wives grow merrier as they set a trap for their shameless suitor, whose uncontrolled appetites make him an easy mark.

Margaret and Alice are the forerunners of Lucy and Ethel, and Shakespeare’s comedy, written expressly to entertain, gives us a sense of what an Elizabethan-era situation comedy might look like.The Falstaff of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” is not the complex figure of the “Henry IV” plays.

(The late scholar Harold Bloom, a Falstaff fanboy, called this version of the character “pseudo-Falstaff, “ and considered “Merry Wives” to be, along with “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Shakespeare’s “slightest” comedies.)Revivals of “Merry Wives” are not all that frequent.I’ve seen Verdi’s “Falstaff,” which heavily relies on Shakespeare’s plot for the opera, more times than I’ve seen the play.

But Margaret and Alice’s quick-witted machinations provide the bas...