Returning to Pittsburgh, acting troupe turns Shakespeare on its tipsy head

Audiences at the Greer Cabaret Theater will once again get to experience the immortal words of William Shakespeare spoken — or, rather, slurred — by one very wasted cast member.

“Sh!tfaced Shakespeare” has been touring here since 2018 and returns from Oct. 2-13 with its hilarious version of the comedy “Much Ado About Nothing.”

“We’ve been to Pittsburgh a few times before. It’s not our first rodeo,” said the Rev. Lewis Ironside, founder and artistic director of “Sh!tfaced Shakespeare.”

The show is part well-rehearsed play and part improv exercise. A cast of a half dozen actors prepare every night to perform a shortened version of classic Shakespeare, artfully abridged by Ironside. But one of the cast members is drunk — both on alcohol and the power to change the course of the play in any of a million ways.

“I invented the show, along with my former business partner, back in 2010. We were running a small theater company in the UK,” Ironside said.

They used to travel to music festivals and events around the country, bringing with them many talented friends and colleagues to perform a variety of shows. “We wanted a headline act for ourselves and we looked down the list of all the ideas we just left lying around, and there it was.”

So he set to writing the hour-long condensed version of a Shakespeare play and finding a cast to perform it. But the night of the first show went very awry.

“We picked the name (of a cast member) out of a hat before the show started and this poor misbegotten actress was sent around a music festival in the UK dressed in Shakespearean costume holding a large sign above her head saying “I’m doing Shakespeare, help me get drunk.’ And the people did. And the show lasted for all of about 15 minutes before she passed out backstage.”

The actress was completely fine, but the leaders of the company pulled the plug anyway. “We immediately decided that this was a stupid idea and we’d never do it again and canceled the shows.”

That didn’t go over well with the hardworking cast, who begged them for another chance, especially since the felled actress was back and ready to go for the next night. So they gave it another shot — but this time with some guardrails in place.

“Word had unfortunately gotten out around the music festival that we’d murdered someone onstage the previous day. We opened our venue that had a capacity of about 300-400 people … unfortunately, about 800 people tried to show up,” Ironside said.

Since then, they’ve been all over the world touring the show.

“We think somewhere in the region of 680,000 tickets since the show has started, and that ranges from 200-seat tiny theaters to 2,000-capacity spaces as well.”

Ironside is Scottish but has lived in the United States for several years.

So what can audiences expect from “Sh!tfaced Shakespeare”? Well, anything.

“I have no idea and I never do, and that’s half the fun of it,” Ironside said.

There will be real Shakespeare — “Hamlet” retains the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, for example — but with the wild card of a drunk cast member, every show is different.

“What the sober cast have to do is basically kind of pick up the ideas — within reason — that the drunk throws in and basically anything can happen. For instance, I’ve just finished doing a run of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the UK for a month. In that particular one, it was not necessarily always a given that all of the characters would survive. There are no deaths in ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ but we do have a sword fight in our version. You never know which lover is going to end up with who.

“On one night, one of the cast had decided that he’d actually lived this life hundreds of times before and this was some kind of weird ‘Groundhog Day’ reincarnation thing. And then just eventually decided that he and Benedick — the main lover — should run away and start a vineyard somewhere. And then the rest of the cast just had to work out, well, how do we get all of these other scenes in, how do we finish it?”

Nudity, swearing and singing are not off the table, according to Ironside.

“I was recently chased off the stage by somebody brandishing a hammer they found backstage. Most things have happened and they do. One night we found an actress had snuck her mobile phone onstage and had just ordered I think about $400 of Domino’s pizzas for the audience while hiding behind a tree on the stage.”

Sadly for those theatergoers, the pizza didn’t arrive on time for the end of the show.

Ironside has played almost all the roles in ‘Much Ado,” including Beatrice. During the Pittsburgh run, he will mostly play the compère, an emcee-like figure who keeps things at least slightly on the rails. “They’re almost like the designated driver for the night,” he said.

“We also like to hand out some instruments. … It is an interactive show, sometimes the audience gets dragged up onstage, sometimes we go out into the audience,” he said. Crowd participation is not guaranteed for any given show, but he suggested that if you don’t want to potentially get involved, you buy your tickets toward the back. Otherwise, you could end up as a character in one of Shakespeare’s great dramas.

“If Romeo has been killed off, perhaps we need Romeo’s twin brother, Bromeo, to appear. I did a show recently of ‘Much Ado’ where something similar happened, a character got killed off and his long-lost cousin arrived. We ended up with two audience members finishing the show for us by having a thumb war wrestle in the middle of the stage to determine the winner, but the rule of the thumb war was that the loser would ‘die,’” Ironside laughed.

This show is for both those who love Shakespeare and those who think they don’t.

“One of the big secrets of the company is we’re all massive Shakespeare nerds,” Ironside said.

“Sh!tfaced Shakespeare” will run from Oct 2-13 at the Greer Cabaret Theatre in Downtown Pittsburgh. For information and tickets, visit trustarts.org.