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The Classical Actors Ensemble likes complete texts and loves the English Renaissance. It generally likes the lights up and live music—almost all popular fare of different genres from our own era—by the cast before the play, occasionally during the play (subbing for a song in the original text), during entr'actes, and even during intermission. They have experimented with Original Pronunciation. They have performed mostly the plays of Shakespeare, as well as a dramatic reading of the sonnets at a fundraising event in their early days about a decade ago. So perhaps because the Twin Cities theater market is large for a midsize metropolitan area and has enough Shakespeare productions to constitute a "season," the CAE has occasionally produced a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In recent years, I've seen three: Webster's Duchess of Malf (reviewed in SB 33.4, 2015, 647–661), Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Its most recent offering in this non-Shakespearean vein was Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl—a welcome and timely staging.
The low thrust stage of the intimate Gremlin Theater evoked an urban setting, complete with strategically placed trash. The musicians played offstage right. The cast entered from the two downstage corners and from three entrances at the rear of the stage, indicating houses. This adaptable set worked perfectly for both the Wengrave house and the street and shop scenes of this city comedy. The three shops were simply evoked with a few props and, of course, the dialog, one in the rear and one each at the...