Excaliber Shakespeare Company, at Di Falco Gallery.
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If the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum in Old Town were still open, Excaliber director and actor Darryl Maximilian Robinson would probably get his own wing. He’s the kind of deliciously melodramatic elocutionist who disappeared about a century ago, after doing declamatory readings of “the classics” on every vaudeville stage and in every state fair tent in the northern hemisphere. Performing selected works of Edgar Allan Poe in The Raven and Six Other Points of Interest, Robinson has got it all down pat: the clipped diction, the grand gestures (he doesn’t sit down, he swoops down), the quivering, orotund voice drenched in a Barrymore-esque accent, even the full-length purple smoking jacket. Yet his chocolate-brown skin, bald head, and dancerly grace add an unexpected sensuality to his persona. If Alistaire Cooke had given birth to Isaac Hayes’s son, he would have turned out an awful lot like Robinson.
