CSI: Verona
"Looks like some kinda gang war, but it just doesn’t add up." The forensics team is on the scene when two men are found dead in the Verona crypt, alongside the body of a recently deceased girl which has been mutilated. Local detective Ignatio (Nikolas Priest) and his team, Hank (Anthony Castellano) and Sally (Jessica Cermak) attempt to reconstruct this crime, with the help of a servant (T. Michael Culhane) who served one of the dead men and the dead girl’s longtime nurse (Elizabeth Claire Taylor). Was this Romeo Montague character a jealous ex-boyfriend who flew off the handle and killed his old girlfriend’s new boyfriend, Paris, before going to town on the body? Did her parents’ pressure cause Paris to go postal when she died before their marriage? Or could the answer be more complicated than any of the CSIs can grasp?
CSI: Verona is a very clever updating of "Romeo and Juliet" which, while it spoils the ending of the much loved play at the top, does a better than adequate job of cleaving to its dual masters of Shakespeare and CBS. (Besides, if you don’t know what happens to Romeo and Juliet already, shame on you.)
No matter how many times Priest puts on his sunglasses and spouts one-liners like "What we have here are two dead gentlemen of Verona" in the style of "CSI:Miami"’s David Caruso, it never stops being funny. Culhane’s lovable hanger-on and Taylor’s stern nurse are forced to do most of the heavy lifting, particularly in the first act, but their idiosyncratic assistance with the detectives is delightful in the hands of director Joe Leo (who also adapted the play).
The mission statement of Misfit Toys Repertory expresses that it gives actors the reason to take roles they would otherwise be disqualified from holding, but no one here seems miscast; in particular, the play brings out the suspicious figure of Friar Laurence (Matthew Patterson) and the meddling Capulet parents (George Trahanis and Melissa Vogt-Patterson) in a way that most productions cannot. The conceit of reconstructing the earlier scenes falls apart a little when it gets to the famous monologues on which no one could have eavesdropped, but "CSI: Verona" should delight fans of both the Bard and the Grissom.
The production has closed.
