Equal parts sexy and strange, Measure for Measure at Crow’s Theatre gets a well-deserved victory lap

Equal parts sexy and strange, Measure for Measure at Crow’s Theatre gets a well-deserved victory lap AISLING MURPHY PUBLISHED 1 HOUR AGO Open this photo in gallery: Danté Prince in Measure for Measure at Crow's Theatre. The production is a roller coaster whose loops you can’t see coming until you’re already upside down. KENDRA EPIK/SUPPLIED COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. Title: Measure for Measure Adapted and directed by: Christopher Manousos Actors: Jamie Cavanagh, Katherine Gauthier, Sébastien Heins, Beck Lloyd, Danté Prince Company: House + Body, presented by Crow’s Theatre Venue: Studio Theatre City: Toronto Year: Runs until Oct. 11 Critic’s Pick Plays-within-plays get a bad rap. Occasionally, that’s justified: Thematic resonances between nested stories, particularly within the canon of William Shakespeare, can feel gratingly obvious. And in the hands of an ineffective director – or the eyes of an overly cynical critic – a metadrama can feel as if it does little more than pad the runtime. I raised an eyebrow, then, when independent theatre company House + Body chose to superimpose a frame narrative around Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s genre-bending problem plays – and one without an existing play-within-a-play, or mise en abyme. Set in puritanical Vienna, Shakespeare’s kinda-sorta comedy follows nun Isabella as she fights to free her brother Claudio from inevitable execution. His crime? Impregnating a woman out of wedlock. When Isabella confronts judge Angelo, acting as the Duke of Vienna’s deputy in the leader’s absence, he offers Isabella an impossible choice: He’ll spare Claudio if she surrenders her virginity to him. Shakespeare’s play as written is psychologically thorny and emotionally dense, a tangle of commentaries on moralism and familial duty. You’d think the addition of highly contemporary narrative scaffolding would either confuse or overexplain the nuances of a text teeming with nuance. Open this photo in gallery: Beck Lloyd and Prince in Measure for Measure. The production is set in a recording studio where Soundwave Shakespeare, a fictional audio-drama troupe, is taping Measure for Measure. KENDRA EPIK/SUPPLIED But when House + Body premiered their Measure for Measure at Crow’s Theatre last year, I was gobsmacked. Director and adaptor Christopher Manousos found a way into the text that not only felt…