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Granted, the premise of Corleone: The Shakespearean Godfather sounds like the setup for an SNL skit: “Hey, how about we take the plot of The…
Granted, the premise of Corleone: The Shakespearean Godfather sounds like the setup for an SNL skit: “Hey, how about we take the plot of The Godfather and make the dialogue sound like Shakespeare? That’d be funny, wouldn’t it?”

Yes, it would. And in Gremlin Theatre’s production, written and directed by David Mann, it’s also many other things: disconcerting, smart, aggravating, ingenious, baffling, amusing, disappointing, strange, beautiful, cheesy, classy, daring, silly, pretentious, entertaining, affected—all rolled into one. Corleone pulses with all of these contradictions and more, and is either a spectacular failure or an unlikely success, depending on how tolerant you are of risky theater experiments that occasionally sputter and choke on their own cleverness.

Corleone began as a well-received Fringe Festival skit a few years ago, and since then author/director David Mann has expanded it into a full-length play that attempts to tell the entire story of the first Godfather movie, with the dialogue written as Shakespeare might have penned it. So, instead of saying, “Let’s eat,” a character will say, “Are you hungry? Come, sustenance awaits.” Or Don Corleone might invert a thought in the style of the Bard: “He speaks of fools, but foolishly he speaks.” Or a line might slip into straight-up parody: “There’s more to this than meets the nose.” Fans of rhyming couplets will not be left wanting, either.

The play is presented as a straight Shakespearean tragedy, with tongue-in-cheek asides here and there for comic relief, and this delicate balancing act is both the play’s blessing and its curse. To his credit, Mann captures the rhythm and spirit of Shakespearean dialogue superbly, and much of the language in the play is actually quite beautiful.  At other times, substituting Shakespearean colloquialisms for Italian mob jargon is just plain funny, as in: “We must make haste to Louie’s restaurant in the Bronx.” At other times, it sounds tedious and forced.

How much you’re likely to enjoy Corleone will depend, I suspect, on how familiar you are with The Godfather, and, more importantly, how versed you are in Shakespeare. Because the vein of genius here is that Mann is parodying both Martin Scorcese and William Shakespeare simultaneously, playing one off the other in a rather sophisticated game of intellectual ping-pong. It’s clear from the beginning that Don Corleone is essentially Julius Caesar, but if you pay attention, there are references to Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, all the Henry’s, and more.

Personally, I found many of these allusions hilarious. For instance, when Don Corleone’s henchmen are sitting around trying to figure out how to kill Corleone’s arch enemy, they run through an entire catalogue of Shakespearean sadism—scooping his eyeballs out with a spoon, poisoning him, strangling him, exposing him to the venom of an asp—and eventually decide upon a hybrid poison/stab strategy. It’s a brilliant scene.

As impressive as this literary gamesmanship is, however, it’s not enough to sustain the whole production. Though the language is sublime, and the acting laudable for the most part, the plot whips by too quickly for much character development, and—except for one exceptionally executed scene, Sonny’s slo-mo murder—the play never comes close to the operatic violence of the movie. An unfair comparison perhaps, but the roles of Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and James Caan were so iconic that one can’t help but compare them in the back of your mind, even if the play itself is also trying to poke some fun at them. It’s hard to have it both ways, though Corleone gamely tries.

Corleone continues at Gremline Theatre through Dec. 13.

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