Summary 
Imaginatively staged and at times brilliant evocation of the silent film-era 1920s in a fast-paced entertainment. The titular best friends and others are more caricature than character, but a madcap backstage vaudeville theme is often very funny in a creative keystone kops approach to one of Shakespeare's slightest plays.
Design
Directed by Dean Gabourie. Set and lights by Lorenzo Savoini. Costumes by Tamara Marie Kucheran. Compositions by Jonathan Monro. Sound by Jesse Ash. Choreography by Kerry Gage.
Cast
Dion Johnstone (Valentine), Gareth Potter (Proteus), Sophia Walker (Julia), Claire Lautier (Silvia), John Vickery (Duke of Milan), Trish Lindstrom (Lucetta), Wayne Best (Antonio), Timothy D. Stickney (Thurio), Stephen Russell (Eglamour), Bruce Dow (Speed), Robert Persichini (Launce), Andrew Gillies (Panthino).
Analysis
A spare studio-space production of a lesser early comedy is an audacious surprise, cleverly updated to the silent film-era 1920s. Dean Gabourie's production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona begins with old-time reel-to-reel projections of grainy black and white images of the song-and-dance vaudeville team of Proteus and Valentine. The images display against a purplish-red curtain upstage as a train conductor probes the audience looking for cell phones. Gabourie begins the production 1.1 by continuing the public address announcements with a curtain call for Valentine, played by Dion Johnstone as he tries to keep Gareth Potter's Proteus outside of dressing room #6. Gabourie's clever conceit is that Valentine is leaving town for the bigger stages of a bigger city, breaking up his longtime act with partner Proteus, and most of Gabourie's scenes are presented in the backstage clutter - props and costumes and dressing tables - of behind-the-scenes theater space. Johnstone's Valentine and Potter's Proteus both wear red-striped jackets with pink carnations and straw hats, along with khaki pants and vests, blue bow ties and handkerchiefs. They carry canes and dance soft-shoe in remembrance, Valentine kicking his heels at Proteus being "over boots in love" with Julia, and they share an embrace with Proteus pick-pocketing his now ex-partner's wallet as a crimson curtain falls behind them.
In a production relying more on caricature than character, Johnstone and Potter fare well, establishing a core of close friends and artistic partners challenged by their romantic feelings for the same woman. Potter's tap-dancing Proteus sits on his suitcase in shell-shocked soliloquy 2.6 to compare Julia with Silvia - "at first I did adore a twinkling star, but now I worship a celestial sun" - and after he manages to somehow rationalize his betrayal of Valentine - "I to myself am dearer than a friend" - he gleefully flips his cap up his arm, puts it on, and grabs his luggage. Johnstone's less worldly Valentine is a slow-learning dupe - when they embrace again 2.4, Proteus cannot pickpocket his wallet because it is now secured by a chain - and when they part, he gives his supposed friend a silly college frat-boy handshake, and they wave fingers and wag tongues in a high-pitched squeal.
The girlfriends in the story are also show business professionals, Julia revealed 1.2 as a dancer, facing away from the audience to curtsy upstage on a foot-lighted platform for an unseen crowd giving canned applause. As she removes her tiara, red dress, and heels, she sits at a vanity table - the mirror removed so she is visible - and discusses with Lucetta her budding romance with Proteus: "I would I knew his mind." Lucetta is a prim wardrobe girl, wearing an aproned dress, plastic spectacles, and her hair in a bun. Excited by the love letter from Proteus, Lucetta jumps up and down, pretends to drop it - "oops!" - then mocks Julia with a torchy ballad sung with a hairbrush for a microphone. Sophia Walker's best moments as Julia come as she tears up the love note, then immediately repents - "oh, hateful hands to tear such loving words" - and continues to waffle: she laughs at the words "I love Julia" then stomps on the paper with her hands before putting another scrap to her bosom and becoming writhingly carnal, only pausing when interrupted by a backstage cleaning crew. When Proteus marches to the moveable door prop at center stage 2.1, he immediately enters Julia's dressing room 2.2 with a suitcase for "a holy kiss" goodbye, and by 2.7 Walker's Julia becomes determined to pursue, with Lucetta helping her disguise herself from the wheeled wardrobes of stage clothing.
After a creative segue - black-and-white film projections of train travel and people at a crowded depot - Claire Lautier completes Gabourie's comic foursome 2.1 with her avant-garde big-stage big-city (Milan) actress Silvia, complete with kicky short black hair, overly made-up eyes and lashes, and a purple velvet flapper gown with belt and high heels. She plays a comically emotive Desdemona in the murder scene of Othello at The Palace - flailing her arms in a cartoonish struggle, left right, left right - upon a divan in blazing footlights before joining Thurio's Othello far upstage for an ecstatic curtain call. Thurio, a posturing bald black man who oddly dons a curly brown man's wig after his performance without hair, swills from a flask and strikes manly poses in a silk robe. He admires his own likeness on the well-lit marquee next to the door before attempting to woo Silvia, but she pays more attention to the witless Valentine, dropping each of her gloves for him to retrieve. By 2.4 she is receiving bouquets of flowers from him, and the story complicates with the arrival of Proteus 2.6, who after the embrace with Valentine, also becomes enamored with Silvia, performing a magic trick to produce a rosebud for her.
Gabourie's already inventive romance gets a winning injection of 1920s-style slapstick humor with the clowns Speed and Launce, the former a Lou Costello look-alike who appears 1.1 in racing goggles upon a bicycle, honking a high-pitched horn - "nothing for my labor?" - before racing off again with Valentine's new wallet in a barrage of honks, and the latter a portly and sad-eyed hobo carrying the even more sad-eyed basset hound Crab 2.3 like a swaddled baby. Launce's deeply injured claims of lack of regard against Crab - "he is a stone" - are a delight, as he wipes his eyes with a soiled handkerchief and hauls out an oversized clown shoe. Launce draws sympathy when Potter's Proteus yells at him 4.4, and overall is quite funny, emerging in a spotlight from a trap with a putter head like a submarine periscope, but Crab steals scenes, wearing a hat or rubbing his hound dog ears along the stage. Bruce Dow's Speed, however, is the comic highlight, a high-energy cartoon of a performer like a mini-Jackie Gleason in argyle socks, checkered bloomers, and a bright vest, and he bolts into the audience to observe the action from steps, then makes impassioned appeals to the crowd as the dim-witted Valentine misconstrues Silvia's obvious flirtations. He concludes the first act with his breathlessly misspoken "you are vanished!" to the banished Valentine, then opens the second act with a brilliantly sung rendition of the 1927 song "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Dow's Speed belts out the tune - "then you rave, you even crave, to see him laying in his grave" - and is joined by Silvia, then Julia, the latter disguised as a Roaring Twenties gentleman.
The supporting characters are colorful idiots, Gabourie apparently depicting the characters with less subtlety to account for fewer passages of dialogue. Even tiny roles like Panthino and Antonio are memorable, Panthino a bookworm in sweater and eyeglasses but the collar of a priest, and Antonio an imposing businessman in a three-piece brown suit with tie, balding and mustachioed and glaring of eye. Eglamour is played as an aging and perhaps somewhat senile silent-movie star in greased hair and a pencil-thin mustache, yet another - "whoa...worthy lady!" - suitor for the lovely Silvia. During 4.3 he struggles to get in a word edgewise, and when he finally manages, Silvia quickly exits, and in 4.5 he skulks upstage in a spotlight like the dashing star of an old black-and-white adventure movie, complete with white scarf and heavy eye make-up.
Most compelling is John Vickery's booming baritone Duke, with his comic-evil enunciation and tuxedo and monocle. During 3.1 he stands downstage upon a tiny bookshelf ladder with a snifter of brandy, studying the volumes upon a narrow shelf. He prances down the steps to confront Valentine nose-to-nose - "stay with me a while" - keeping with creepy relish the young lover from his attempted elopement. Johnstone's Valentine, wearing an oversized coat that poorly conceals a heavy rope ladder, sits and perspires and makes exasperated expressions. Vickery's semi-sadistic Duke reads the love letter while twirling his mustache and exclaiming, then crumples it and bounces it off Valentine's head ("make speed from hence"), dismissing him with snide intimidation. Shakespeare's outlaws on the frontier of Mantua are in Gabourie's urban free-for-all a pack of masked street muggers with pistols concealed within their dirty sport coat pockets.
Gabourie drives the sometimes awkward plot of the second act with a quickened pace. 3.2 is particularly funny, with Lautier's Silvia storming offstage in tears to slam the dressing room door as the Duke assures Thurio - "fear not but that she will love you" - of her passion for him. When asked about Valentine, Proteus quietly responds - "gone, my good lord" - but Silvia still overhears offstage and renews her caterwaul wailing. Potter's Proteus then sings like a lounge-lizard crooner in his black tuxedo, Thurio beside him with a red rose between a teeth, the red curtain beyond showing the image of a full moon. By the time he finishes his love song - "who is Silvia, what is she?" - the moon has become Silvia's face, and the stage star herself appears upstage in a feathery robe-like dress, diamond-laden and off-put. Potter's Proteus becomes further enamored, and Walker's in-hiding Julia - "alas!" - becomes despondent.
The cumbersome fifth act of Shakespeare's play provides Gabourie with his master stroke, an homage to silent-film comedy. The masked muggers attack, in pursuit of Silvia in trendy riding clothes, and they criss-cross the stage to ragtime a jangling piano score like in a manic keystone kops chase. They race off to whistle blows, their movements exaggerated - pumping arms, kicking legs, big leaps, hands pressed to cheeks - with clever sound effects as if from a silent reel-to-reel action film. The madcap muggers final catch Silvia and wrap her in a rope ladder, and Proteus rescues her. When he vows 5.4 to "woo her like a soldier" - "false perjured Proteus!" - he grabs her and she resists, then Valentine steps in to save the day, sending Potter's Proteus sprawling.
Gabourie deftly handles the difficult conclusion, with Silvia nodding to Valentine to permit him to accept Proteus's apology and the Duke acknowledging - "I do applaud thy spirit" - Valentine's valor. When Walker's Julia reveals herself as a woman, Silvia and Valentine rise together in surprise, and he takes Julia's hand to couple it with Proteus's. The Duke is moved to tears and pardons the exiled muggers, and Valentine - "one feast, one house, one mutual happiness" - has the final happy words.
Gabourie provides a big finish, appropriate for a 1920s-style production, with a song-and-dance capped by a re-appearance of the vaudeville act reunited - Proteus and Valentine - and giving an eight-footed tap dance, each wearing a big overcoat to conceal an extra tiny dancer. The cast then reprises "A Good Man is Hard to Find" - "so, if your man is nice, take my advice and hug him in the morning, kiss him ev'ry night" - in a bravura final moment. Contrary to the thoughts of some Canadian newspaper critics, Gabourie's imaginative Two Gentlemen is a fast-paced delight, a creatively staged and energetically performed vision of an early Shakespearean comedy.