My overall impression
From whatever angle you approaching Gus Krieger’s melding of Shakespeare’s canon with Breaking Bad, you will be enticed by each moment, by every line, stoked with a hot poker to catch every word lest you miss any reference.
By blending passages and lines from the canon with the names, places, and necessarily-skin-and-bones plot of Breaking Bad, what Krieger and the Porters have created is a spark notes rendering of the hit television series that keep the Shakespearephiles perked up, hoping to identify from which play each line comes.
While many favorite elements of Breaking Bad are lost (my kingdom for a Mike), the massive paring-down is obviously required for the time constraints of Fringe, and quickly force the audience to adapt our point of view from the stance of “how will they do this part?” to “which parts made it?”
Krieger’s Lord Walter of Albuquerque is a smooth and grounded character, savoring each word but never luxuriating. His “seven stages of cooking meth” speech is particularly effective, as is his Shrew-inspired “household stuffs” bit (because, let’s be honest, who – of those who have studied or performed Shrew – hasn’t wanted to go off naming whatever was lying about in that speech?).
Jesse James Thomas nails Pinkman’s overzealous speech patterns, deftly substituting “wenches” for “bitches” to cap each line while Timothy Portnoy captures Saul in all his greasy, endearing, spinoff-worthy glory. Meanwhile, Dana DeRuyck uniquely embodies the neuroticism of both Lydia and Marie, then slays the audience with the slaying of Jane.
Bard takes the minimalist needs of Fringe and runs with them. Using a potent yet almost non-existent set (Alex Parker) and relying much more heavily on the use of props and gloriously evocative costuming (Jessica Pasternak and Drina Durazo), the story is cleanly and quickly told with zero dead air; a tribute to Drina Durazo’s tight and breakneck direction.
Though the run is nearly done, I would keep my ear to the ground for rumblings of future performances. While Fringe-proper winds to a close, I would be more shocked if this were, in fact, the end of Breaking Bard than not.
