What happens when you mix Shakespearian romance with the velvet-voiced soul of Bill Withers? In the hands of Toluca Lake’s Troubadour Theater Company, the result is A Wither’s Tale, directed by Matt Walker and playing now through September 26th at Burbank’s Falcon Theater.

The production derives its name from The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays that straddles the border between psychological drama and comedy. The story revolves around jealous King Leontes who decides with little concrete evidence that his pregnant wife Queen Hermione has been unfaithful. After banishing his Queen despite her Oracle-proven innocence and ordering his servant to abandon her presumed “female bastard” child on the shores of a faraway land, Leontes realizes his suspicions may have been unfounded. Despite the high drama of the early storyline, the play ends happily with only a few minor casualties and king, queen, and full-grown daughter reunited.

 The Troubadour Theater Company Players, affectionately known as the “troubies,” condense the five-act play into a 90-minute romp that infuses over-the-top performances (think Billy Madison reciting Hamlet) with pop cultural references (a servant asserts that jealousy-crazed Leontes has “gone all Mel Gibson on us”), and, of course, plenty of Bill Withers tunes.

While their performances were solid, it seemed the actors were more concerned with getting laughs than drawing their audience into the narrative. Their comedic, sometimes ad-libbed renditions of Shakespeare’s characteristically verbose style were amusing during lighter moments, but awkward when the play grew serious. At the dramatic climax when Leontes (Matt Walker) is reunited with the presumed-dead Hermione (Monica Schneider) after eighteen years, Walker broke character to point out that his multiple role-playing co-star Beth Kennedy had forgotten to remove her tooth blackout makeup from the previous scene. Though the audience chuckled, the assertion significantly reduced their emotional investment in the scene.

 Similarly, the troupe seemed to incorporate Withers’ music into the narrative for the sake of pure novelty, doing little to preserve the emotional impact of the soul legend’s songs or advance the production’s storyline. “Grandma’s Hands,” Withers’ beautiful, heartfelt homage to his late grandmother, became “Oracle’s Hands” in the context of the play, but the number neither conveyed the poignant simplicity of the original nor adequately described the action taking place in the scene. In the same vein, “Just the Two of Us” was changed to “Just the Three of Us,” and the “Lovely Day” finale included an original verse that clumsily summed up the play’s events. Stripped of their original meaning and ineloquently altered to loosely fit the play’s narrative, the songs sounded corny and out of place.   

Yet despite the Troubies’ blasé treatment of the works of both Bills (Shakespeare and Withers), their production is undoubtedly entertaining. They sing, they dance, they make Lindsay Lohan jokes, and they genuinely seem to have a great time onstage.

However, the players’ charisma is not quite charming enough to make up for the production’s lack of depth. Though the cast laments that there “Ain’t No Sunshine," there seems to be a little too much in A Wither’s Tale to sufficiently carry either Bill's material.

Reach staff reporter Diana Siegel here.