Review: Shakespeare the Comic in FRIGID New York’s Little Shakespeare Festival’s “As You Will” and “As You Wish It”

As You Will

Created by Conor Mullen, David Brummer, and George Hider

August 3-16, 2025


As You Wish It...or The Bride Princess....or What You Will

Written by Michael Hagins

Directed by Kat Santomoreno and Michael Hagins

Presented by Fork the Odds Productions

July 31-August 9, 2025


Part of the Little Shakespeare Festival 2025 presented by FRIGID New York at Under St. Marks, 94 St Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC, July 31-August 17, 2025

For most American high school students, their experience with Shakespeare is with the tragedies, and surely this contributes to the sense of Shakespeare as the Bard, writer of elevated, high culture entertainment. Of course, in reality, in his own time, Shakespeare was anything but, which is beautifully captured in this year’s Little Shakespeare Festival, “Not Your English Teacher’s Shakespeare.” The unscripted, improvisational As You Will and the Shakespearean Princess Bride parody As You Wish It are both poignant reminders that Shakespeare was also a brilliant comedic writer, but perhaps even more so that the theater should be a good time.

With just a title prompted by the audience, the actors of As You Will present “brand new,” never seen before (or since) Shakespeare plays complete with scholarly footnotes—the day I went, the play was “The Merry Whores of Windsor.” Occasionally bordering on the slapstick, the production also highlights the skill of the actors, whose improvisational rhymes were often quite clever, and their wit in the parody of academic conventions with the footnotes. The unscripted nature of the production highlights the sometimes capricious or serendipitous nature of dramatic decisions—not from the mind of a great genius, but the result of who is in the room at any given time.

Billed as a Shakespearean parody of the 80s cult classic The Princess Bride, As You Wish It largely follows the narrative of the original film with word-by-word paraphrases of its most famous lines (i.e. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”). It is at its funniest when it presents parodic pastiches of famous lines from Shakespeare, largely from his tragedies—for example a killing rendition of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, a hilarious occurrence of Richard III’s “My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse,” and, from a comedy, Helena from Midsummer’s absurdly bad line “I am amazed and know not what to say.”

In bringing Shakespeare down off his pedestal, both productions remind us that plays are living entities, malleable and meant to be adapted. Moreover, there is so much that can happen in the moment in the theater that, if the actors are attuned to it, can truly produce something never seen before. 

-Stephanie Pietros

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