Pig Iron’s Twelfth Night is the best Shakespeare we’ve ever seen

We haven’t really been reviewing much of the Fringe/Live Arts stuff we’ve caught thus far this year on the rationale that it’s pointless to rip into something if there aren’t any more performances and the group is unlikely to be participating next year/the venue was so ill-suited to the show that most of the dialogue sounded like it was being performed by Charlie Brown’s teacher/it was a one-off from out-of-towners who seemed to be under the Fringe umbrella almost by accident.

But! We saw Pig Iron’s Twelfth Night at Suzanne Roberts Theatre last night, and it is just fantastic. We’d even say it’s the best Shakespeare production we’ve ever seen. It’s really tough to bring clarity of meaning to Shakespearean language without going into over-obvious pantomime, and it’s really, really tough to clarify the old-old-old-school jokes enough to get true laughter out of an audience, the kind you would get at Airplane! or Knocked Up, instead of half of it being that awkward “HA HA HA that was a JOKE and I know this because I have READ THE PLAY unlike the rest of you ignoramuses around me who are not laughing!”

But this Twelfth Night is goddamn hysterical. It really is. Especially the Fool. We’d do a review, but what could we really say that every other theater critic in town hasn’t already said? In any event, there are four performances left, and we highly recommend you catch one.

[No, Pig Iron did not buy a lot of ads. Or if they did, we don’t know about it. —ed.]