by Chris Jones
January 27, 2011

A zesty Chicago export is headed to Sydney next month. Not to mention Dandenong, Wagga Wagga, Wollongong and other onomatopoeic points in Oz that sound like ideal landing pads for insouciant, high-end rappers from the Northwest Side of Chicago.

The Brothers Q, once behind the counter at the Merz Apothecary in Lincoln Square, now a lettered brand all of their own, have focused this past decade on one main thing: the rap-ization of the Bard of Stratford Upon Avon. By now, nobody does it better.

When they get to Australia, one hopes that the Qs' quirky raps and rhymes might remind Aussies that there's a lot more to the Chicago soundtrack than rat-a-ta-tat. But before they go, GQ, JQ and their friends are back on Navy Pier remounting "Funk it Up About Nothin'," their PG-13, soon-to-be-touring version of "Much Ado About Nothing." More work has been done over the last two years by a cast that has mostly remained together, and the show is significantly tighter, funnier and smarter than before. On Wednesday night's opening, it went down better than Vegemite in a hungry kangaroo.

The Qs are best known for "The Bomb-itty of Errors," their ubiquitous, much-produced rap version of "The Comedy of Errors." I prefer "Funk it Up." It's far more interesting—and, as they age, the Qs are getting more interesting too. All kinds of people have messed with "The Comedy of Errors," a farce to begin with, but "Much Ado," a multiplotted romantic comedy, is a trickier beast. But not tricky enough to defeat the Qs, who find contemporary equivalences for all the major character types, from MC Lady B (the killin' Ericka Ratcliff) on down that rosta'.

It's an irreverent affair, certainly, that will drive a certain subset of folks mad (you know who you are and don't go). But it's very much in the spirit of the original—and a healthy entry in the debate that it's time we ditched the original archaic language of Shakespeare and, well, funked it up good and fresh for the young hipsters. Some of the time at least. Frankly, the core artistic truths survive better this way than in many productions that bend the original text into contorted trendiness.

In many ways, Shakespeare's Beatrice and Benedick were proto-rappers, their famous jousts of emotional denial feasts of verbal performance. Inveterate verbal tricksters, the Qs juice the feisty pair up (they could go further with that, actually) to DJ Adrienne Sanchez's beat, drawing from the competitive nature of slam poetry, which, for a lot of folks, is a far earthier rendition of the original banter than watching, say, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson swap consonants.

And when B and B are closed for business, the Qs find hip comedic takes on everyone else in the play, from a childlike Hero (here a rapping ingenue shrewdly played by newcomer Jillian Burfete) to Dogberry (now GQ's campy Dingleberry) to Leonato (here rendered as a hilarious rapping Pantalone who insists on delivering a Me-logy as distinct from a eulogy). They solve the famously tricky problem of why Claudio (Jackson Doran) is so quickly taken in by his sweetie's alleged infidelity by imagining a scene with a blow-up doll (works for me), and GQ explains why evil Don John got that way, which the original play does not do so well. I wish that the fun would stop for a moment when the play turns dark and serious, which would only make its impact stronger.

That's not happening. "Funk It Up" is a very enjoyable 70 minutes of ribaldry and repartee—and a subversive act of cultural appropriation. They'll get that point in Wagga Wagga.

Explore Funk It Up About Nothin' and learn more about the production.