Pocket Play Review: It’s the Comedy of Errors, Hon! at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company

Author Julie Hammonds is on a quest to complete Shakespeare’s canon in calendar year 2025. In these pocket play reviews, she records brief impressions of each show she sees.

• The Play: It’s the Comedy of Errors, Hon! (actual title; show is based around Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors)
• The Company: Chesapeake Shakespeare Company
• The Stage: CSC’s own indoor stage, a historic building remodeled into “a modern Globe Theater for indoor performances”
• Run Dates: February 14 through March 9, 2025
• Memorable for: A script that took liberties with Shakespeare’s text to make The Comedy of Errors funny again
• The Margaret Birch Award for physical comedy goes to the hilarious Jose O. Guzman as both Dromio characters

Pocket Play Review: After 400 years, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors can feel timeworn. Thinly plotted, it makes a claim in its title that is sometimes tough to carry through in performance.

Not in this production! Director Ian Gallanar re-imagined the play, adding and cutting dialogue and setting it in “a Baltimore of the Mind” peopled by characters Shakespeare never imagined, including writer Edgar Allen Poe, Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, and statesman Frederick Douglass.

This made the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s production a hilarious introduction to all things Baltimore, from National Bohemian Beer to beehive hairdos to yard flamingoes. In his notes on choosing to change Shakespeare’s words, Gallanar called the play “my love letter to Baltimore.”

The talented cast warmed up the diverse audience with pre-show music and kept us entertained throughout the play with their high-energy antics. I’m told that comedy is harder to act than drama, but this group made it look effortless. I couldn’t imagine a brighter, tighter ensemble.

In sum: In their delightfully re-imagined Comedy of Errors, Ian Gallanar and the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company have cooked up a tasty crabcake that does their Baltimore hometown proud.