By Lisa Larson
While the idea of one of the nation’s renowned Shakespeare festivals producing a spoof entitled Shakespeare’s Worst! may seem a little outside the norm, anyone familiar with this side-splitting comedy and the playwrights behind it will likely be touting Shakespeare’s Worst! as one of this season’s best at the Utah Shakespeare Festival.
Created by Peabody and four-time Emmy award winning writer for The Simpsons Mike Reiss, with co-author Nick Newlin, Shakespeare’s Worst portrays a quick-moving version of Two Gentlemen of Verona—with a twist.
Capitalizing on some opinions that Two Gentlemen of Verona is the Bard’s worst play, Reiss and Newlin’s version features one actor who is aware of the production’s shortcomings and decides to helpfully point those things out to the audience throughout the show.
“It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s educational,” Reiss said in an interview in 2017. His typical tongue-in-cheek humor is evident as he adds, “You can tell your friends, ‘Oh, I saw Shakespeare,’ not ‘I got drunk and saw a quick show.’”
The run time for Shakespeare’s Worst! is quick by Shakespeare standards—only about seventy-five minutes. But it’s packed with all the humor one might expect from someone who made his career writing the scripts for America’s favorite cartoon family, The Simpsons.
Mike Reiss
Reiss’s involvement with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, and more may be among his most internationally acclaimed projects—but it certainly isn’t his only claim to fame.
Early in his career, Reiss worked with Al Jean as a writer and producer on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, ALF, Sledge Hammer, and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. Then in 1989 he and Jean took their talent to the animated world of Springfield, Illinois, writing the first thirteen episodes of the Fox Network series The Simpsons.
“The Simpsons wouldn’t have been the Simpsons without (Reiss),” Sam Simon, co-developer of The Simpsons said in an interview in 2009.
Eventually, after season four of the show, Reiss left to create The Critic, another animated project, this time about film critic Jay Sherman.
During his career, Reiss has written jokes for Joan Rivers, Garry Shandling, Johnny Carson and Pope Francis. You can also see Reiss’s handiwork inside numerous film screenplays. He’s written jokes for the film Ice Age and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, as well as Horton Hears A Who.
Reiss has published several children’s books and he even co-authored his own memoir, Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons.
With all this television and book writing experience filling up his resume, Reiss eventually decided to turn his attention to the stage. Why? “Because after a point you get tired of earning money and having people see your work,” Reiss says, in a way that only he can, in a YouTube interview.
Turning his talents to the stage seemed to Reiss like a natural fit. In some ways, he said he felt like he’d been “writing a play a day” when he was writing for TV, according to an A&E interview in 2013 discussing his play I’m Connecticut.
In television, everyday “you write it and you watch it,” he said. “You get very good at assessing what will and won’t be funny, what a scene needs. Playwrights don’t (usually) have that advantage.”
It’s an advantage that was once again put to great use when Reiss and his former college buddy Nick Newlin decided to collaborate to write a spoof on what some consider to be the worst play Shakespeare ever wrote.
Joining Forces with Nick Newlin
Adorned in a jester-style hat and equipped with a disarming, self-deprecating style, Nick Newlin recounts his relationship with Reiss in a 2017 promotional video for their joint project, Shakespeare’s Worst!
“Mike Reiss and I went to college together many years ago. After college Mike became an Emmy award winning Simpsons comedy writer and I became a juggling jester at Renaissance fairs around the country,” he said.
Newlin’s career eventually led to teaching Shakespeare at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. As the author of a book series titled, 30 Minute Shakespeare, Newlin said his goal is to get kids up on their feet performing the work of the Bard in a fun and accessible way.
Ultimately Newlin’s ability to make Shakespeare fun and Reiss’s ability to make fun of Shakespeare led to the perfect collaborative team.
Although Reiss said his somewhat pedestrian research on the topic revealed at least eight contenders for the title of being the worst play Shakespeare ever wrote, Newlin felt strongly the top, or bottom, of that list is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and ultimately Reiss agreed.
“The end of the play is such a train wreck that in our show we have to play it three times in a row just to let it sink in,” Reiss said in a BBC interview in 2017.
“That is why I picked it,” Newlin said in the same interview “One of the characters tries to go after his best friend’s girlfriend and then when she says no, he basically tries to attack her. Then the other best friend comes up and castigates him for it, but for some reason two seconds later the best friend whose girlfriend has been attacked is offering his girlfriend to his friend and they’ve made up in three seconds for no reason. It’s just not right.”
The play itself, however, comes together in a way that is not only right, but hilarious.
Shakespeare’s Worst! will take place as a full production inside the intimate Anes Studio Theatre at the Utah Shakespeare Festival Aug. 5 through Oct. 9.
