Sylvestro gets tickled with brooms during performance. Photo courtesy of UND professor Brad Reissig.

I really wanted to like UND’s production of “Scapino!” but in the end, I couldn’t find anything about the play I really enjoyed.

When I walked into “Scapino!” Tuesday, on opening night at the Burtness Theatre, I was pretty hopeful. Some of the actors were on stage already. The actors were moving around the stage portraying the everyday lives of their characters before the show began, which at first seemed pretty cool. The town seemed very laid back and relaxed.

This changed completely, however, when the show began.

Immediately, the show breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience with the usual message to turn off your cellphones. Following that, there is a dance number that lasts far longer than it needs to, but on the whole is pretty decent as the song is “Mambo Italiano,” and that song is great.

However, the dance sequence went on long enough for me to realize that I have no idea who any of the characters are. I mean Carlo shouted his name at the beginning, but I have no idea who he is beyond that, and someone else shouted “Scapino!” so I thought maybe they were Scapino but that guess was wrong.

The show tended to do this a lot, so much so that at times it took far too long to figure out who someone was, because the show didn’t care to tell me. This had to have been one of the worst things about the show. It moves at such a frenetic pace that it forgets to inform me of who characters are and what their relationship to the story is.

Following the dance sequence, the audience finds out Ottavio, the son of Argante, has defied his father’s will and married a poor girl named Giacinta, rather than the marriage his father had arranged to the daughter of Geronte.

Similarly, they discovered Leonardo, Geronte’s son, has married a young woman captured by “gypsies” without his father’s permission. Both of the young men enlist the help of  the trickster Scapino to deceive their fathers.

Of course just to reach that point I had to sit through a lot of jokes that didn’t make much sense and dragged on far too long.

This is followed by a chase scene that goes up and down the aisles of the theater and all around the stage and in the spirit of consistency, isn’t funny, lasts way too long and tells me nothing about the characters.

In fact, at the end of the play, I was struggling to figure out why I was supposed to care about the sons wanting to marry women who they had just met. The play never shows them together or does anything to establish their love for each other, besides telling me they do. It made it so whether or not they ended up together was unimportant to me, because I barely understood anything about the characters.

The same goes for the rest of the characters, they don’t receive any interesting or substantial characteristics, let alone any motivation for their actions.

At one point in the show, the sons need to steal money from their fathers. Leonardo needs the money to pay the “gypsies” to free his wife, while Ottavio needs the money because I don’t know. They never explained why he needed it, it’s just a set up for more hijinx, with no real bearing on the plot whatsoever.

This happens another time when Scapino claims he needs to take revenge on Geronte, leading to an overly long joke about putting Geronte in a sack and then beating him up.

Now the joke is bad enough, including a somewhat offensive impression of a Japanese person, but what was on my mind the whole time was one question — Why? Scapino seemed to have no reason to beat up Geronte other than the fact it would be funny.

This is the play’s problem, it refuses to set anything up or tell me anything about the characters, which makes the play a chaotic stream of events that seem to have little or no connection to one another.

The set in the show is inoffensive, it’s nothing amazing, but it serves its purpose. As does the choreography, which has little setup but at times is pretty impressive.

The acting is where I had a lot of questions. I was unsure whether the acting was part of the problem, or if it was simply a product of the horrible writing.

I think it was a mix of both.

The actors had energy, but it was so much that the characters were as hyperactive as an 8-year-old after two dozen pixie sticks. It made the story, the dialogue and even some of the jokes hard to follow.

As a whole, I give “Scapino!” two out of five stars. The show lacked any redeeming qualities at all.

I generally try to find something in a play that I really like, which I can say made the play worth seeing for me, but in “Scapino!” the only thing I really enjoyed was the music tracks that were selected — and those weren’t even original.

Alex Bertsch is the opinion editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].