Yuletide Cheers: ‘The Santaland Diaries’ in Lenox

 

David Begelman, Theater Critic

 

David Sedaris is no stranger to a wide readership, not to mention radio and theater audiences hankering for his version of belly laughs galore. A popular voice on the NPR radio series, “This American Life,” Sedaris has authored written works like “Holidays on Ice,” “Naked,” “Barrel Fever,” and more.

He has also co-authored a number of plays with his sister, Amy. Brother and sister Sedaris, by their own admission, come from a family that takes disfunctionality to new levels of grandeur. Never you mind. He is a shoe-in for a revered place in the pantheon of outstanding American humorists. His hilarious monologue about his own escapade as an “elf” hired by Macy’s Department Store is by now a staple in yuletide productions across the land.

Shakespeare & Company’s new production of the humorist’s “Santaland Diaries” is hardly in a minimalist mode. In his days as a struggling young actor, Sedaris recalls his stint as an elf with the disarming moniker of “Crumpet.”. Except in this production he is a fortyish man, relating his past elfin gig in a plush apartment with upscale accommodations including a baby grand piano, and a view of the Manhattan skyline that any hedge fund manager would envy.

“Crumpet” in the current show has evidently come into his own later on in life. But is this what Sedaris intended? After all, the monologue as written is brimming with the kind of sardonic humor that only a put-upon might level at his corporate bosses at Macy’s who have the gall to make him play the fool.

When “Crumpet” (the ebullient Peter Davenport) sheds his staid apparel to reveal his “green velvet knickers, forest-green velvet smock, and a perky little hat decorated with spangles,” the description was intended to be more like a complaint than a cute aside.  “It doesn’t get any worse than this,” says Crumpet, whose satirical remarks about everything are in the Swiftian mode; not simply a tongue-in-cheek badinage about the past.

Davenport, despite his unquestionable ability for portraying many facets of Crumpet’s experiences as a put-upon hireling, loses out on the darker, and more ironic, aspect of the character. Director Tony Simotes, the newly appointed artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, has opted for a different take on “Crumpet.” It is not one this reviewer senses is true to the Sedaris intent.

Crumpet’s observations sometimes cut to a wrenching emotional core, and the counterpart between them and his humorous dialogue is why the monologue is so arresting.

During yuletide, “Parents have an idea of a world that they cannot make work for them;” a lad who visits Santa Claus at Macy’s voices the poignant wish his dead father were alive and for a set of teenage mutant ninja turtles, or “It doesn’t get any worse than this.” Hardly the sentiments of an elf who feels all’s right with the world, or that humor has no darker underbelly.

Shakespeare & Company’s wish to cut to the comic chase in this production perhaps overlooked the downside aspect of “Santaland Diaries” that makes it such compelling fare.

“Santaland Diaries” runs until Dec. 30 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Saturday matinees on Dec. 11 and 18 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $16-$48, and can be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353, or contacting www.shakespeare.org, 

 

  

 

 

            

 

‘War of the Worlds’ is a comedy split down the middle

By David Begelman

 

Theater Critic

In playwright Howard Koch’s imaginative—if not occasionally runaway—adaptation of H. G. Well’s “War of the Worlds,” a team of eager radio broadcasters enacts a simulated invasion on the world by Martians.

A similar scenario was dramatized in the now famous 1938 version of a Mercury Theater broadcast by a 22 year-old Orson Welles. Across the years, its aftermath took on a legendary, albeit overinflated aspect. The broadcast did not ignite a national panic, as was subsequently advertised. Only a lesser number of radio listeners who failed to hear the announcement at its end were ready to take to the hills.

In Shakespeare & Company’s current production, the setting is the “Jack Holloway Show,” a listener-friendly evening of “Song and Dance” preceding its “Mystery Theatre” presentation. This turns out to be a simulacrum of the hour-long 1938 treatment of the theme: extraterrestrials launching an attack on New Jersey.

In director Tony Simotes’s treatment of the Koch script, the First Act briskly sets the stage for news of the invasion. Before minor performers in walk-on roles can hurriedly deliver ominous bulletins to announcers during the Second Act, the show has a charm that all but dissolves in later flurries of tumult.

“War of the Worlds” opens with a lively introduction to life among backstage studio collaborators. With a garnish of audience participation, a number of very funny personages step forward to do their thing. These include radio announcers with bouncy vocal deliveries (Scott Renzoni), hilarious mimics (Josh Aaron McCabe), female vocalists who prettify the goings-on (Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Dana Harrison), flamboyant thespians doing their part-time radio gig (Jonathan Croy), the show’s host, Jack Holloway, who does a fetching rendition of the ballad, “Smile” (David Joseph), and the indispensable “Foley Artist,” a fellow in charge of sound effects (Michael Pfeiffer).

The company of players, the very best around when it comes to artfully executed farce, is a gifted group of performers with an aptitude for skillfully calibrated ensemble work. Were only the scripted Second Act up to the standards of the First!

The comedy’s ongoing conceit is that the cast is performing for an assembled radio audience. So it is not clear why they start to behave in the studio as they imagine the listening audience might, hearing their broadcast. Either one is a performer or a panicked citizen—but not both at the same time.

The Second Act is also encumbered by an overdone, kitschy enactment of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude from “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” a tedious final speech by McCabe as Professor Pierson, and a pious insertion of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” doubtlessly added to assure everyone of being on the right side of the Lord in the face of alien attack.

The company ends with the ditty, “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the last line of which is “If You Believe in Me.”  Only, it may be conjectured, when you are in the First Act.

“War of the Worlds” runs through November 6 at the at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre of Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA 01240. Show times are 11:00 AM, 2:00 PM, and 7:30 PM. Tickets are $48 and may be purchased online at www.shakespeare.org or by calling the Box Office at (413)-637-3353.

 

 

 

 

‘As You Like It’ is a big, beautiful blast at Lenox

                David Begelman

 

Theater Critic

If you’ve ever harbored any reservations about the capability of Shakespeare & Company, your doubts should be dispelled on the spot while savoring its current production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” This is as stellar a staging of a Shakespeare play you’re likely to see in many a moon.

It’s not the only comedy of the bard in which a female character hides her true identity in male garb (“Merchant of Venice” and “Twelfth Night” contain such conceits), nor the only one in which a woman seeks refuge in a forest (“Midsummer Night’s Dream” includes this scenario.) But for a heroine bestowed with a mother load of ingenuity and personal resources, Rosalind is up there with the best of them. Exile in the Forest of Arden is pretty much a cakewalk for her.

The actress who portrays her in this production, Merritt Janson, is such a bundle of talent, her every word, gesture—and even her gymnastic sallies—are delightful, springing as they do from an obvious wellspring of ability topped with a fetching smile.

Janson is surrounded by a team of performers whose portrayals only enhance the attractiveness of this production. Although many different styles of performance grace the latter, Director Tony Simotes has calibrated them so deftly, there’s not a downbeat or discordant note anywhere in the effort.

The comic relief in this staging simply has to be seen in order to be appreciated. Humorous touches, delivered with on-cue precision by several cast members entrusted with the lion’s share of creating jollity, need to be mentioned. They are: Jonathan Epstein in a wily and hilarious rendition of Touchstone, Malcolm Ingram as the faithful, but doddering retainer Adam, who always manages to convey the impression he is on the brink of death, Kevin O’Donnell as the puffed-up Charles the Wrestler, Dana Harrison as the flighty Phebe, and Jennie M. Jadow as the lusty Audrey.

In less comedic characterizations, Tony Roach was full of youthful vigor and romantic longing as Orlando; Johnny Lee Davenport turned in sturdy portrayals as the competing potentates, Duke Frederick and Duke Senior, while Wolfe Coleman crafted a commendable performance as Orlando’s nasty brother, Oliver.

Kelly Curran was especially riveting as Rosalind’s close friend, Celia, and the scenes between her and Janson were in the opinion of this reviewer among the highlights of the show.

Director Simotes chose to adapt a Parisian 1920 ambience for the setting of the play, and if you failed to consult the playbill, you’d be a bit perplexed why the sound of the “La Marseillaise” was being piped in, or military types on stage were prancing around in French legionnaire uniforms. Maybe Simotes attached more importance to this than necessary; the setting and costumes could have been Elizabethan, Jacobean or Edwardian without any appreciable sacrifice to the overall quality of this production.

Serious theatergoers shouldn’t forfeit the opportunity to catch this impressive show. Bravo!

“As You Like It” runs through September 4 at the Founders’ Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 7:30 p.m., Sunday matinees 2 p.m. Tickets are $10-$85 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.   

 

 

 

 

Two Plays at Lenox

David Begelman

            Question: what do Joe Penthal’s Blue/Orange and Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing have in common as dramas? Answer: nothing much. The former is a serious play about two psychiatrists who clash over the treatment of a mental patient; the latter is a comedy about a group of zany theater people who, aboard a steamer with its share of nautical kinks, squabble over the production of a musical. The ship is a heaving vessel forcing passengers to retain their precarious balance on it by careening to and fro on deck in order to avoid falling flat on their faces.

On the other hand, both plays utilize the considerable talents of three actors: Jason Asprey, who plays a fledgling psychiatrist in one play (Bruce), and a hilariously wry playwright with a proclivity for the well-timed quip in another (Alex); Malcolm Ingram, who plays a smug and nerdy supervising physician in one play (Robert), and a haughty actor exuding pseudo-suavity in another (Ivor); and LeRoy McClain, an agitated psychiatric patient in one play (Christopher), and in the other, an off balance waiter with a genius for script writing and an appetite for slugging down cognacs on the slightest pretext (Dvorncheck).

The surprise is that you’d never know each of these actors performed in both plays. This speaks volumes about the individual talents of the three, and there is something to be said about acting skill as the degree to which an audience fails to realize that it is the same person in separate roles. Mr. McClain in particular may be extremely funny wobbling across the deck in Rough Crossing, tray in hand; he was stunningly charismatic in Blue/Orange as a black psychiatric patient whose problems are compounded by the conflict between his two supervisors. Mr. McClain’s performance oozed reality out of every pore. For this reviewer, his was not only a memorable portrayal, but possibly the finest one of the entire season at Lenox.

            Other actors in Rough Crossing included Bill Barclay (who designed the sound for this season’s Antony and Cleopatra, and is a multi-talented resource for the company) playing Adam Adam, a composer who has one hell of a time avoiding pratfalls and getting a sentence out past a stutter that seems to last forever before giving up; Elizabeth Aspenlieder, in the role of a somewhat dotty and histrionic actress no one could possibly confuse with Greta Garbo because of her thick Slavic accent (she also does double duty as Public Relations Director for Shakespeare & Company); and especially Jonathan Croy, who turned in a jewel of a portrayal as another playwright whose exasperated appeals to his performers to get it right sends him into paroxysms of frustration. All performers in Tom Stoppard’s play delighted an audience that greeted the comic moments on stage with belly laughs and standing ovations at the exuberant curtain call. Sheer hilarity. So much for the immensely talented casts. What about the plays themselves?

            Mr. Penthall’s Blue/Orange deserves to be seen because of the importance of the issues it broaches. The writing on occasion becomes a bit talky or preachy, especially when characters make forays into psychiatric philosophy. Despite this, the play does confront issues that are profound and multi-layered. They include ethical questions arising over treatment approaches to patients; the problem of racism in psychiatry; and the problem of ascertaining truth. Momentous to be sure, such issues cannot be digested en masse without spreading oneself too thinly. Mr. Penthall’s play accordingly runs the risk of biting off more than it can chew.  It contrasts with the sharpened focus we find in plays about the treatment of black persons by Anthol Fugard, the masterful South African playwright. All the same, the theatergoer would benefit from exposure to Mr. Penthall’s spin on some fairly controversial topics.

            The two British psychiatrists in Blue/Orange, sometimes seem lost in a time-warp. They both have diagnosed their patient Christopher as “schizophrenic” and as having “borderline personality disorder,” apparently unaware that these two diagnoses are inconsistent for the same set of symptoms. And practitioners today might insist that the first order of business in a case of a patient who, like Christopher, sees oranges as blue (an image borrowed by Mr. Penthall from the French surrealist, Paul Eluard) is a neurological, not psychiatric determination. Possible brain malfunction of a diagnosable kind should be ruled out before a psychiatric disorder is even considered. And for someone suspected of “loose associations,” Christopher certainly has one hell of a set of dialectical skills keeping his shrinks off balance.

            Contrary to both Mr. Penthall’s  psychiatrists, being delusional does not by itself make Christopher “schizophrenic,” and his agitated behavior and grandiose thinking (he imagines he is the son of the tyrant of Uganda, Idi Amin) may be an expression of bipolar disorder. Ironically, in the past it was British, not American psychiatry, which retreated from overdiagnosing schizophrenia, a fad on this side of the Atlantic.         

Robert insists that “delusions” are created only through a cultural filter that biases our treatment of others, including black patients. The viewpoint has a sixtyish flavor. While cultural biases exist, they are hardly a basis for a wholesale rejection of the reality of a psychiatric disorder. Nor does the difficulty of determining a defendant’s guilt in court mean there is no such thing as murder. Finally, “neurosis” is a term that is currently bereft of any diagnostic utility, included though it is in the glossary of terms in the playbill that figure importantly in the play.

Rough Crossing is a playwriting escapade that is a sea change from Tom Stoppard’s mesmerizing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The writing gets rougher toward the end of the play when the shenanigans on board the steamer betray a glimmer of tedium, and the humor starts to trade a delightful Noel Coward/Cole Porter-style repartee (even the set could double for a production of Anything Goes) for the slapstick antics familiar in the farces of Georges Feydeau. Even so, the comedy has the audience at Shakespeare & Company’s Founder’s Theater virtually falling off its seats. Especially noteworthy are several of the song and dance numbers, culminating in a rollicking piece involving all cast members at curtain call.

All in all, if a playgoer were afoot for experiences that were intellectually challenging and side-splitting fun, then Blue/Orange and Rough Crossing fit the bill extraordinarily well. This reviewer had the pleasure of seeing them both in one day, in his opinion a satisfying recipe for taking the wind out of the sails of customary griping over daily tribulations.

Blue/Orange runs from July 5 through September 2; Rough Crossing from May 25 through September 2  at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA 01240. Tickets can be purchased by calling the box office at (413)-637-1199.

             

           

             

           

 

           

The Winter’s Tale falters at Lenox

 David Begelman , Theater Critic

Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” leaning on a plot in Robert Greene’s “Pandosto: The Triumph of Time,” was probably authored in 1611. It was among a late cycle of dramas which, like “Pericles,” “Cymbeline,” and “The Tempest” are called “romances.”  A mixture of tragic and comic elements, they were inspired by stories originating in ancient Greece that tell of wanderers, heroes who escape disaster, shepherds frolicking about the countryside, and star-crossed lovers who are separated before finally being united.

The play’s action is driven by a delusion of Leontes, King of Sicilia, that his wife, Hermione, has been having an affair with his long-time friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia. The latter has been a visitor at court, and Leontes is convinced his queen is pregnant with his friend’s child.

Things go from bad to worse. Leontes tries to have Polixenes poisoned, puts Hermione on trial for treason, banishes her newborn babe to the hinterlands, and receives news that his young son Maximilius has died. Apollo sends the monarch glum tidings from the Delphic oracle that he has screwed up royally. But it’s the death of his son and collapse of his wife in court that takes the wind out of his paranoia, resulting in his abject contrition.

In director Kevin G. Coleman’s present staging of the play, the gloomy court of Sicilia is bedecked in black, white, and reddish sets and costumes, while walk-on performers strike stationary poses on stage. They also have problems aplenty speaking the King’s English. Only Jonathan Epstein as Leontes seemed suffused with believable emotion after the onset of a psychosis that erupts all too complacently for “an infection of my brains.”

The production makes a spirited effort to enliven things in the kingdom of Polixenes (Johnny Lee Davenport). The switch to an upbeat atmosphere in this realm is clear in Shakespeare’s play. Bohemia abounds in peasants, shepherds, and all around merriment. Except in this production, the jollity escalates into a fracas in which peasants have at each other as if they were in a street rumble.

Comic relief comes in the form of Autolycus (Jason Asprey), a self-professed “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”—in short, a thief. He pilfers money from a wandering clown who turns out to be the son of the Old Shepherd (Malcolm Ingram). The latter has reared Perdita (Kelly Galvin) from infancy. She is in reality Leontes’ abandoned babe. Asprey lightened things up considerably, although by being on the manicky side, there was a loss of some of his dialogue

Hermione (Elizabeth Aspenlieder) usually is played as a woman who, although victimized by her husband’s jealous rage, still retains her dignity—even when on trial for her life. Aspenlieder’s interpretation of the role emphasized more the character’s crumbling under pressure, a quite different spin. Improbably, she sported a funky blond Shirley Temple wig that struck a frivolous note for a luckless queen.

Current productions at Shakespeare and Company use audience aisles to some advantage, although the interplays with the audience get to be on the slapstick side.

“The Winter’s Tale” continues through September 5 at the Founders’ Theatre, Shakespeare and Company, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, Mass. Performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $14-$85, and can be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353, or contacting www.shakespeare.org, 

 

 

      

 

    

 

Faces of Infidelity: Othello and The Ladies Man at Shakespeare & Company

David Begelman

With a sidelong glance at the current political scene, 2008 must be the year of the farce. Is that the reason so many of them are being staged around the tri-state area? Westport Country Playhouse has mounted Scramble!, A Flea in Her Ear is being staged in Williamstown, and The Ladies Man has opened at the Founders Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts. One way or another, the influence of Georges Feydeau is discernable in all three productions.

Many among us love farce. You were more than likely as not to see this reviewer hitting the floor in paroxysms of laughter when watching Shakespeare & Company’s rendition of The Ladies Man, freely adapted from Feydeau’s Tailleur pour Dames. The fit drew little more than sneers from sourpusses on either side of him in the audience as though, like Pooh-Bah—the Lord High Everything Else in the Mikado— they were born that way.

As part of what Shakespeare & Company calls its first brunch matinee event of the 2008 season, the theater has dished up a hilarious version of the Feydeau farce. All of the eight performers in its cast have the timing and precision of just what it takes to roll with the necessary ingredients: in and out of slamming doors, ill-timed assignations, faux German or French accents (sounding in the case of Dave Demke as Etienne, house valet, like John Cleese’s fawning French waiter in The Meaning of Life), accomplished gyrations in compromised physical positions, and the complexities and confusions of sexual scenarios gone haywire. It is a madcap romp in La Belle Epoch France.

There is little in Feydeau’s confection that compares to Othello, Shakespeare’s majestic treatment of a military commander who becomes a tortured soul. Yet the French farce is, in a curious way, the flip side of the towering tragedy. Both plays deal with  themes of imagined infidelity, albeit in ways that are worlds apart. The two are also double-billed on the same day at the Founders’ Theater in Lenox Massachusetts, as if one of them was intended to be relief from the other.

The two plays at Lenox also share several of the same performers, Shakespeare & Company’s ingenious way of underscoring the range of abilities in its seasoned actors. Jonathan Croy doubles as the beleaguered Dr. Hercule Molineaux in the Feydeau farce, and Lodovico in Othello; Walton Wilson enacts a stuffy, Bismarckean officer and husband in the farce, and an outraged Brabantio, father of Desdemona, in the tragedy; Michael F. Toomey plays the lisping and hounded Bassinet in the farce, and Montano in Shakespeare’s play, while the multi-tasker Elizabeth Aspenlieder (she’s the publicity director for the company), plays a wife who is determined to cuckhold her Prussian husband in an acrobatic play for Dr. Molineaux that is, choreographically speaking, a tour de force. She’s also Bianca, mistress of the traduced Michael Cassio in Othello.     

The Shakespearean tragedy, one of the playwright’s finest, is a tightly constructed drama about a military commander in the Venetian army whose aide contrives to destroy him through innuendo about the infidelity of his adoring wife, Desdemona. The worm in the equation is Iago, arguably the most perfidious villain in all of dramatic literature. “Honest Iago” is the general’s spin on his treacherous aide, played by Michael Hammond as a silver-haired patrician type. The interpretation is an unusual, albeit plausible one, and a cut apart from the gruff, bawdy, NCO-type of villain portrayed by, for example, Frank Finlay or Bob Hoskins.

Mr. Hammond’s interpretation of the role leans heavily on the humorous side of the villain, less on the terrifyingly dark side of his “malignity without motive” lurking under all other aspects of his persona. Although Mr. Hammond’s performance was distinctive, it never quite raised the hair on the back of one’s neck, as this villain was meant to do.

The character of Othello may be the most daunting challenge for an actor in all of dramatic literature. It certainly was for the likes of actors from Salvini to Olivier. Not all characterizations were successful because of the demanding nature of the role, and performers went down like bowling pins in the face of the challenge. David Garrick, the outstanding naturalistic actor of the eighteenth century, bombed in the role. Othello invariably exacts a price from any lead not up to the subtle and not so subtle transitions of emotional intensity, rage, and contrition.

John Douglas Thompson has a head start on the portrayal of Shakespeare’s tragic hero. He is equipped physically for the role, and his presence on stage is always commanding. Director Tony Simotes’ approach to Act III, Scene III, in which Iago’s venomous insinuations start to unravel his general, was wisely moderated, and Othello’s fury was unleashed with intensity only subsequently in scenes with Desdemona. Mr. Thompson’s choice of an African dialect, while emphasizing a perception of Othello as “the other” in a Venetian state that must have represented its share of culture shock for a black foreigner, nonetheless became a clipped, somewhat awkward overlay atop the beauty of the verse. Nonetheless, Mr. Thompson had moments on stage that compared favorably to the best performances of the past. This is no mean accomplishment in a role the gods have deemed impossibly difficult.

Other performers acquitted their roles well, if not memorably. Yoshi Tanokura’s four-pillar set design was impressive, while Les Dickert’s amber lighting bathed performers in a perfect ambience for ongoing action.

Overall, a most enjoyable day in the theater—if you aim to laugh and cry within a short span of hours.

The Ladies Man opened at Shakespeare & Company at 70 Kemble Street in Lenox, MA on May 23, 2008. Othello opened on July 18. Both shows continue to August 31, 2008. Evening performances are at 8:00 PM, matinees at 3:00 PM. Tickets range from $15 to $60, and may be purchased by calling (413)-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org

      

 

        

     

“The Tempest” a mixed blessing at Shakespeare & Company

 David Begelman

Theater Critic

The ending lines of Shakespeare’s last play form the couplet “If you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.” Well, forgiveness may extend to many things, but not to deleting those words (or the epilogue preceding them). They celebrate the bard’s poignant farewell to the theater.

But that’s just what director Tony Simotes does in the current production of “The Tempest” in Lenox. There are several other questionable directorial choices in the show, along with positive and innovative touches. All things considered, the beauty of the play and its poetic imagery shine through an occasional misdirected attempt to do justice to one of the glories of dramatic literature.

Simotes has by now has established himself as a master of the comic conceit. His technique is more at home in plays like “As You Like It” or farces than it might be in dark comedies like “Twelfth Night” or in Shakespeare’s later romantic comedies like “The Tempest.” In these plays, an ethereal or magical atmosphere should pervade a vehicle. This can be jarred by the antics of performers who exaggerate how funny they can be or who play tastelessly to the audience.

In the current updated production, the role of Prospero, renamed Prospera, is taken by an actress (Olympia Dukakis). This is hardly news. In the 2010 film adaptation of the same play, the British actress Helen Mirren was cast in the role. Female actors in leading male roles was innovated as early as Sarah Bernhardt’s “Hamlet.” In Shakespeare’s time all female roles were undertaken by males. No point in declaring it’s time to level the playing field. This has been happening all along. The character of Ariel, the sprite who does Prospero’s bidding, is a male role. But it is played as often by women (Kristin Wold in this production).

Dukakis’s interpretation of Prospera seemed to lack gravitas. At times she appeared to be less in command of her “bare island” despite her magical powers. The actress sometimes radiated more agitation than imperial control of events swirling around her. And she tended to become snippy, rather than calm things down in a more serene way. What’s the point of being a powerful magician holding sway over an island if every little setback has you riled up?

Merritt Janson as Miranda, Prospera’s daughter, supplies a richer interpretation of her role. The part is usually taken by an actress who projects simplicity, obedience, and innocence. Janson has Miranda much more gutsy about the “brave new world that hath such people in‘t.” When it comes to Ferdinand (Ryan Winkles), a newcomer to her island, her appetite for him includes some secret hand-holding and schmoozing behind the back of her ever vigilant mother. It’s a rebellion waiting to happen.

Other commendable interpretations were of Gonzalo (Apollo Dukakis), Stephano (Jonathan Epstein) and Caliban (Rocco Sisto). The spirits of Juno (Stephanie Hedges), Iris (Casey McShain), Ceres (Jennifer Young) and Spirit (Monica Giordano) who “Are melted into air” could do without the garish costumes designed by Deborah Brothers. These are imaginary goddesses, not paraders at Mardi Gras in Rio.

“The Tempest” runs through August 19 at the Tina Packer Playhouse, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA 01240. Performances are  Tuesdays through Sundays at varying 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. schedules. Tickets are $15 to $95 and may be purchased online at www.shakespeare.org or by calling the Box Office at (413)-637-3353.

 

 

‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’ is a boisterous, campy romp

David Begelman

If you’re looking for the highest reaches of dramatic art in the Charles Ludlam spoof “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” you’ll be disappointed. What you’ll get is hardly unforgettable playwriting, but rather a madcap pastiche of deliriously funny moments of contrivance and situational twists that tickle the funny bone to the max.

Shakespeare and Company, a group of performers that has distinguished itself for delivering such well appointed comedies as Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” and “Rough Crossing,” and Georges Feydeau’s “The Ladies Man” has mounted yet another wildly funny show. The Ludlam farce, while a notch below the playwriting of those other venerable vehicles, is nonetheless a bundle of belly laughs in its own right.

Ludlam has crafted a farce in which two actors perform eight different roles. The playwright insisted that both performers should be of the same sex as a precondition of production. This ensures that cross-dressing is yet another component in this face-paced comedy of zany circumstance that has audiences in various states of hilarity —when not rolling in the aisles.

“Irma Vep” would tax the resources of any two performers. It is virtually bursting with rapid costume changes, piped-in melodramatic musical cues, sundry special effects, dialogue full of double entendres, wisecracks, props like wolf carcasses, sliding bookcases, and dialogue suddenly interspersed with words filched from—of all things—Macbeth and Hamlet.

Ludlum’s madcap comedy was first produced by the Ludlum Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and opened Off-Off Broadway in Greenwich Village in 1984. Closing almost two years later, in 1991, it became the most produced American play, and the longest running one ever produced in Brazil, South America.

The comedy opens in Mandacrest, the estate of Lord Edgar (Ryan Winkle) and Lady Enid, Edgar’s second wife (Josh Aaron McCabe). The latter, who toddles across the stage in mincing steps, lives in the shadow of Edgar’s former wife, Irma, whose portrait hangs ominously above the fireplace in the spacious parlor of the estate.

The action takes off in a series of scenes involving “ungodly nights” of fog-laced, moonlit ambience, werewolves, vampires, traduced characters who are quick to observe that they “feel the green fairy’s fang,” a portrait that begins to bleed when hit by a bullet accidentally discharged from a gun, and a household maid who elects to cheer things up by serving a sumptuous breakfast of “kippers and kidneys.” 

There is even an excursion to an Egyptian tomb where Lord Edgar hopes to unravel the mystery of Mandacrest by investigating the sarcophagus of a mummy in an unexcavated tomb—courtesy of a conniving Arab with an eye patch all too eager to cut a self-serving deal.

Winkles and McCabe tear up the scenery in episodic grandeur, to the considerable enjoyment of the audience. The dialogue is bursting with allusions to themes in Victorian novels, Agatha Christie mysteries, gothic invention, Shakespeare, horror flicks, Alfred Hitchcock, and every cliché imaginable. (McCabe as an improbable character, the hunched-over Nicodemus, has an accent that is too Boris Karloff to be accidental.)

The show is a delightful spoof of much you have seen or read about in stories that keep you young, albeit shivering at night between the sheets. Moreover, it is delivered by two seasoned troupers that are a pleasure to watch doing their breathless thing.

“The Mystery of Irma Vep” runs until March 27 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12-$48, and can be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353, or contacting www.shakespeare.org, 

 

 

  

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ is a bellyful of laughs

By David Begelman

Theater Critic

Those master performers of farce at Shakespeare & Company are at it again. I can only assume they know a good genre when they see it. Need we mention the company’s stellar productions of Tom Stoppard’s “Rough Crossing” and “The Real Inspector Hound,” George Feydeau’s “The Ladies Man,” and the Charles Ludlam spoof “The Mystery of Irma Vepp”? They were all staged with an exuberance that has more than tickled audience funny bones.

This time, it’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” a zany take-off on Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale spun around an adventure of the sleuth extraordinaire, Sherlock Holmes. The play was authored by Steve Canny and John Nicholson, and had its premiere at Shakespeare & Company in 2009.

It hardly matters that the script and the current production bear little resemblance to the original short story. Fidelity to literary sources is the last thing audiences will have on their mind in treating themselves to this spoof. The adaptation—outrageously derivative is its proper designation—is simply too funny to make you care one way or another.

The credit for the riotous confection goes directly to Director Tony Simotes. He displays a deft hand at creating delightful bits of situational humor and physical artifice that distinguished his work in this season’s marvelous “As You Like It.”

This time, the same three performers who starred in the 2009 production have joined hands to give audiences what the company excels at delivering. They are Jonathan Croy, Ryan Winkles, and Josh Aaron McCabe. The latter two actors tore up the scenery in episodic grandeur in “Irma Vepp,” just as they do in “Hound of the Baskervilles.” The two team up with Croy as the venerable (but usually addled) Dr. Watson.

Winkles and McCabe have the lion’s share of costume changes and switching characters—often hilariously. McCabe is wildly funny, whether as a sedate Holmes, a suspicious character bulleting across the stage on a crutch, a diminutive and bearded troll-like creature who seems barely three feet high, or a seductive Spanish temptress who wields two noisy fans to emphasize her dramatic, but scarcely consequential remarks.

Winkles likewise draws a hugely appreciative audience response as a cowering coachman whose frayed nerves are evident in the vibrating horsewhip he holds while being intimidated, as Sir Henry Baskerville being taken aback by the sudden disappearance of his trousers, or being framed in a devilish portrait of himself beaming with self-satisfaction.     

The humor in this show is pretty much divided between the dialogue and the situations characters find themselves embroiled in—or ditzy combinations of both.

In the character of Holmes, McCabe radiates the smugness of the famous sleuth. When queried by his sidekick what school it was in which all the students were found poisoned, you can see the answer coming from a mile away: “elementary, my dear Watson!”

“The Hound of the Baskervilles” runs through September 4 at Founders’ Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 7:30 p.m., Sunday matinees 2 p.m. Tickets are $21.60-$48 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.              

 

   

The Canterville Ghost at the Elayne Bernstein Theatre: Otherworldly and Hounded

David Begelman

Oscar Wilde had something to say about many of the pretensions of his day, not the least of which was the British pride of Empire. What better way to do this than to have English traditions bump heads with those crass folks from across the ocean, Americans?

Shakespeare and Company’s current production of The Canterville Ghost resurrects Wilde’s humorous spin on the enduring British preoccupation with ghosts. There’s a lesson to be learned about a departed aristocracy forever haunting dark corridors of musty castles. The conceit may be a metaphor for keeping an imperial past alive in an empire that fears the sun is fast setting on everything old and honored.

In his novella The Canterville Ghost, the Irish wit inaugurated a literary tradition of ghosts as put upons. However scary in past centuries, Wilde’s Sir Simon de Canterville has one hell of a time living up to the spine-tingling reputation he was supposed to cut in his haunted manor with its newest family of invaders from across the Atlantic.

In the current production, Michael Hammond, Assistant Director of Shakespeare and Company, plays the ghost, Sir Simon. He also doubles as Mrs. Umney, the manor housekeeper, and Lord Canterville, the surviving relative who introduces the Otis family to their new home. Mr. Hammond exhibited his customary ingenuity in roles calling for disguises or character-change, and his opening remarks to the audience were for this reviewer one of the delights of the production.

In Wilde’s story, the Americans included a “minister” with some influence in the Democratic Party, whereas in Ms. Brook’s production, the Americans sport Stetson hats, talk in southern drawls, pitch commercial products like lubricants and stain removers, not to mention break out suddenly into line-dance numbers to the tune of Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart.” The antics are destined to tax to the hilt the residual patience of any medieval ghost.

Michael F. Toomey plays Hiram Otis II with a brash and effusive élan laced with a perfect southern accent. He and his high energy, intellectually challenged family drive the 300 year-old apparition to distraction. As for their American reverence for British pedigrees, the hayseed foursome, on perusing the gallery of portraiture decorating the walls of the ghost’s manor, remark, “There’s not a lot of variety in the gene pool.” Enough to cut even a fearsome spirit to the very quick. 

Sir Simon’s numerous guises horrified his ancestors. In Wilde’s story, the Honorable Thomas Horton was reduced to idiocy after the ghost turned himself into a black dog; whereas old Lady Startup in 1764 was given to piercing shrieks culminating in a stroke when confronted by The Vampire Monk, or the Bloodless Benedictine. And Colonel Carbury, who had the audacity to play dice with the ghost, was discovered the day after in a paralytic state, unable for the remainder of his days to say anything but “Double Sixes.”

Sir Simon’s hauntings are hopelessly ineffectual on the Otis family. In both the story and the current production, they offer the ghost commercially marketed oil, Rising Sun Lubricator, to soften the sound of his clanging chains, Dr. Dobell’s Tincture for his pale complexion, and Paragon Detergent for a bloody stain that keeps reappearing on the very spot on which the ghost’s wife was murdered in 1575. As Wilde and Ms. Brook observe, the Otis family “were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence,” albeit not without a flair for the commercial pitch. All the same, they drive Sir Simon to the heights of exasperation, until their youngest and most sympathetic member, Virginia, redeems the ghost.

 Dana Harrison as Libby-Boo and Lucretia Otis provided a stalwart back-up role for her husband. Alexandra Lincoln as Chastity and Washington radiated exuberance, and like Alyssa Hughlett as Virginia, showed how capable she is when it came to the challenges of stage movement.

Unfortunately, Ms. Brook’s and Ms. Brownsted’s script has several problems. Character changes across time frames were confusing (why and when does the girl Chastity transform into the boy Washington Otis, and do the hand puppets the latter wield represent the family twins? When are characters their present day or past incarnations, and how is the audience supposed to tell the difference?)

Ms. Brook’s improvisational style of directing may be a creative challenge for her performers, although it may have a down side for production values. Humorous moments, while plentiful, seemed to alternate with others in which the action dragged, or seem to function as a time-filler between more developed sketches. And some devices, foreign to Wilde’s story, seemed out of keeping with its stage adaptation, like Virginia’s sudden burst of ballet dancing. Tour jetés around the medieval helmet the Otis family calls “the rust bucket” seem oddly out of whack with ongoing action. Lines such as, “Oh, the horror, the horror!” are too close to those in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to avoid uncomfortable comparisons.

Yet the comedy on balance was an enjoyable one, and enhanced by Katy Monthei’s set design, Shelby Rodger’s costumes, and the ample lighting and sound design of Tina Louise Jones and Michael Pfeiffer.

The Canterville Ghost opened on September 19 and runs through November 9, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA 01240. Show times are 11:00 AM, 2:00 PM, and 7:30 PM. Tickets are $48 and may be purchased online at www.shakespeare.org or by calling the Box Office at (413)-637-3353.          2008 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre of Shakespeare & Company,

 

‘The 39 steps’ is a hoot in Lenox

 

David Begelman, Theater Critic

If you remember the early classic Alfred Hitchcock film, “The 39 Steps,” you’ll probably also feel it can’t hold a candle to later movies directed by the master, like “Vertigo,” “Rear Window” or “The Birds.” And let’s not forget “Psycho,” that blood-curdling romp of bathtub murder laced with some pretty unnerving stuff about a killer who can’t tell the difference between himself and his mother. Murder in all its guises seems to be Hitch’s specialty, thankfully. Where can you come up with a director who can turn something so ugly into a thing of beauty?

No matter. Shakespeare & Company has mounted an innovative riff on John Buchan’s novel, adapted into a 1935 Hitchcock flick starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. The company’s hilarious treatment of the book and movie is so side-splitting funny, you can dispense with what its narrative line is all about. You won’t be able to understand it, anyhow. Just sit back and enjoy the goings on, configured by director Jonathan Croy from an adaptation of the novel and film by Patrick Barlow.

And if you’re shopping around for the best theater in the tri-state area for staging farce, go no farther. It’s Shakespeare & Company all the way. I venture to say the Lenox company is better at this genre than anything else, including Shakespeare. Although artistic director Tony Simotes’ smash hit of the bard’s “As You Like It” was nothing to sneeze at on any accounting. It’s when the company goes serious, as in the recently produced “The Tempest,” its past  “A Winter’s Tale” or “Othello” that the going gets a bit rough.

In the current production, three consummately talented performers take on all the roles. Never mind the obvious cost-cutting, belt tightening measures taken to stage a worthwhile production. The plain truth is that this production is so well directed, so enjoyable, that audiences are filling the Elayne P. Berstein Theatre to the brim. This reviewer had to wend his way through overcrowded seating to find his seat—midway through the run of the comedy, to boot.

In “The 39 Steps,” as in the Hitchcock flick, Richard Hannay (Jason Asprey) is an innocent enough Brit who is attending a London music hall production. Suddenly. Shots are fired, and the rest is history. Hannay is plunged into a world of intrigue, assassination attempts and embroilment in a Nazi scheme to pilfer British military secrets during World War II.

Again, no matter. Three performers take on a bewildering variety of roles that have you at the point of hysteria in audience seats. Asprey is in one role as Richard Hannay, the bewildered hero of the comedy, whereas Elizabeth Aspenlieder appears as three separate characters (mostly vamps). David Joseph takes on 14 roles, including the buck-toothed “Mr. Memory,” not to mention a slew of other unforgettable characters.

Josh Aaron McCabe, a talent for all seasons if ever there was, plays 15 separate characters, including women, old and young. It’s the rapid costume changes and sudden alterations of character that have you riveted in merriment over the course of the two-act comedy. See it.

“The 39 Steps” runs through November 4 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 7:30 p.m., Sunday matinees 2 p.m. Tickets are $15-$50 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.   

        

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare and Company’s Cindy Bella (or The Glass Slipper)

David Begelman

Word has it that Irina Brook, who directed and with Anna Brownsted coauthored Shakespeare and Company’s musical updating of the Cinderella tale, drew her inspiration from Rossini’s opera, La Cenerentola. Well, not completely. Cindy Bella (or The Glass Slipper) is such a pastiche of borrowed musical stuff from so many sources, it’s fair to say Ms. Brook favors a cut and paste approach with considerably more than Rossini to paste.

Unveiled as a work in progress last September, Ms. Brook’s hurried vehicle slaps together not only memorable arias, including one by Puccini (her downtrodden heroine Cindy Bella is heard singing O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi on the accordion no less than five times). Her step-father, in a distraught mood, delivers a near complete rendition of Verdi’s Ế sogno o realtá? from his stirring opera Falstaff.  

Ms. Brook’s modernized Cinderella or Cindy Bella goes by the name of “Angelina,” so that the director has the opportunity to celebrate such latter day musical enthusiasms as the Louis Prima spin on a waitress of the same name, who works not at La Scala, but “at the pizzeria.”

Another character, Dandini (played by David Joseph), who disguises himself as Prince Charming (actually, the latter is called Ramiro for reasons too obvious to mention), contributes his own rendition of the Pavarotti hit, O sole mio.

 I think it’s fair to say that Ms. Brook is enraptured more with things Italian than merely Rossini, even though strains of his finale to the William Tell Overture (a.k.a. the thundering hoof beats of the Lone Ranger) are also plugged into her assortment of musical numbers.

Other disparate touches are thrown into the mix and come at you like curve balls. The fairy godmother, Alidora (played by Renée Margaret Speltz), appears in a white outfit indisputably Indian in style (although she enters speaking Italian), and the last musical number of the show bears an eerie resemblance to a Bollywood dance fest from Mumbai, as in Slumdog Millionaire.

Cindy Bella (played disarmingly by Heather Fisch) is condemned to drudgery in the home of her step-father, Don Magnifico (played by Benjamin Luxon with an accent too British for a presumably Italian paterfamilias). Mr. Luxon’s baritone is a dead giveaway of his operatic training.

Don Magnifico’s spoiled and nasty daughters, Clorinda and Tisbe (played by Dana Harrison and Caley Milliken in overdrive), whether recovering from a previous night’s hangover, or throwing tantrums about the set, have both set their sights on attending a ball to snatch up Prince Ramiro, played by Scott Renzoni. In order to keep his identity secret, the prince drifts onto the stage in beret and glasses. He falls for Angelina despite her lowly domestic station, and even before she dons her dazzling ball attire. Her only accessory during their first encounter is her accordion, and it must be her rendition of the Puccini aria that clinches it for the smitten Ramiro.

As in the original Cinderella tale, Angelina attends the ball decked out gorgeously, only in an improbable black top hat and white veil. Nonetheless, Ramiro’s ardor is in no way lessened because of her unusual attire.

At the stroke of midnight, Angelina flees the ball, just as her fairy godmother, Alidora, has instructed her. In Ms. Brook’s version, Angelina purposely leaves a shoe (transformed from a sneaker in previous performances) for Ramiro to trace, rather than accidentally losing it while rushing from the palace. The ending of the musical follows the usual plot line, with lovers united, sisters and step-father flummoxed and then contrite, Angelina forgiving, and everyone living—well, you know the drill.

Cindy Bella (or The Glass Slipper) has a problem with a dizzying array of newer material that is grafted onto the popular fairy tale. A bewildering mix of classical, operatic, and modern musical numbers follow one another as though they were mustered from a concert lost in a time warp. For example, Don Magnifico and his two daughters dance and sing to “Putting On the Ritz,” in a comedic routine we thought was put to rest in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.  

Much of the dialogue is on the corny side. Don Magnifico bellows to his off stage daughters to “Get your bloomin’ asses down here!” (a like-minded sentiment reminiscent of Eliza Doolittle’s howl at the racetrack in My Fair Lady); a character muses, “You make my jingle bells jingle;” while sophomoric jokes pepper the script, like: “What do you call cheese that’s not yours? Nacho cheese!”

There’s much descent into the aisles by characters at several points in the musical, and a good deal of updated contrivance is on the silly side, as when Prince Ramiro calls his aide “Percy” on a cell phone to catch Angelina running from the ball, or when the evil sisters beg the old man for a credit card on their shopping spree.

Maybe Ms. Brooks’ show could be a hit with a child or high school audience. For theatergoers with an appetite for something more substantial, it’s just a lot of fooling around with much of the action bereft of redeeming qualities. In short, a piffle.         

The premiere of Cindy Bella (or The Glass Slipper) opened on December 10 for a limited 11-show run through December 20, 2009, at the Founders’ Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Massachusetts. Seating by general admission. Tickets are $34 and can be purchased by calling the box office at 413.637.3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.        

 

 

 

         

     

 

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well at Lenox

David Begelman  

Will Shakespeare, like most of us, had his slumps. All’s Well That Ends Well, one of his dark comedies, was probably written somewhere between 1600 and 1605. It was authored between two worthier creations, Twelfth Night and Measure For Measure, and is overly long, bursting with contrived and not especially admirable characters, and calls out loud and clear for directorial relief.

All’s Well That Ends Well also has the distinction of being a rarely staged play. Its  revivals are eagerly awaited to see what new spin an enterprising director will put on it to redeem it.

Director Tina Packer, the guiding light of Shakespeare and Company, the impressive area theater with a home in Lenox, Massachusetts, has opted to do just this. It  is also part of her  announced goal to produce all the plays in the Shakespearean canon.  

Her effort in this case must be reckoned only partially successful. Lesser works in the canon like Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and All’s Well That Ends Well take only band-aid relief, at best. When it comes to shoring up quality, in the final analysis “The play’s the thing,” as one of the bard’s most notable characters observed.

All’s Well That Ends Well concerns the efforts of Helena, a low-born daughter of a deceased physician, to land her man. He is Bertram (played convincingly and unobtrusively by Jason Asprey), the son of deceased Count Rossillion. Helena (played with ardor in a youngish portrayal by Kristin Villaneuva), is a gentlewoman in the household of the Countess of Rossilion (played exceptionally well, and with an accomplished matriarchal flair by Elisabeth Ingram).

Helena has a secret passion for the young nobleman, and pursues him with determination. At the court of the King of France (played in a royal, if somewhat stilted, manner by Timothy Douglas), our heroine’s medical expertise is recruited to cure the potentate’s grave illness. Some Shakespearean scholars have surmised this must have been an anal fistula. Not the last of the down and dirty scenarios in this drama.

In return for his new bill of health, the King awards Helena the husband of her choice. She chooses Bertram, who is so outraged at being saddled with someone below his social station, he promptly takes off for the wars in Tuscany. Accompanying him is his cowardly, bragging companion, Parolles, played to the hilt in an overly foppish way by Kevin O’Donnell. In the past, it was one of Sir Laurence Olivier’s roles.

Bertram, as if to place as many impediments in the way of a match engineered by others, forecasts: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband” (Act III, Scene ii). Talk about stumbling blocks and a girl’s impossible dreams.

 On military maneuvers in Italy, Bertram is no slouch when it comes to hitting on camp-followers. He connects with a comely Florentine lass, Diana, upon whom he bestows the ring in question. Except Diana (played attractively by Brittany Morgan) arranges with Helena, who has spread  a rumor of her death, a nighttime substitution of the latter for herself in Bertram’s bed. Diana also slips Helena the ring, and the bait-and-switch scenario is finalized.

Sexual exchange ruses come right out of Boccaccio’s Decamaron, the bawdy tales that were the original source of Shakespeare’s plot, courtesy of Palace of Pleasure by the Brit William Painter, who translated the Italian’s works into English.

The final discovery scene has Helena appearing in court as if risen from the dead, and pregnant with Bertram’s child. The ring is also produced (in the event a resurrection and a pregnancy weren’t enough to persuade), and Bertram falls to his knees, contrite over how he could have been so mistaken about the identity of his true love, promising to: “love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (Act V, Scene iii). Believable he’s not; perpetual adolescent, he is.

Everyone lives happily ever after, including the King with reassembled fundament and the suddenly reformed Parolles. Had enough?

Tina Packer has devised a stunning method of brightening the action of the play. This included heightening its farcical elements, a trend initiated by David Garrick in 1756. She has cast an exceptionally talented member of her company, Nigel Gore (in past seasons a commanding Marc Antony and a hilarious Nick Bottom), in the role of Lavache, whom she turns into a troubadour in the court of Rossilion.

Stepping out of character, Lavache sings songs gleaned by the director from the Shakespearean canon, as well as older troubadour works. These are accompanied by off stage musicians on a variety of instruments.

Mr. Gore is not always on pitch, and his vocal stamina seems to weaken the more he sings, but he is impressively utilized, all the same. His humorous scenes as Lavache, and his repartee with the talented Elisabeth Ingram as the Countess, were for this reviewer the most accomplished acting in the production.

The second act of the play—no reflection on Ms. Packer, whom we can envision struggling to brighten things up in a script notorious for its artificiality—had its tedious moments.

When all is said and done, all’s not well that ends, because all doesn’t end that well. But if you’re looking for someone to blame, it’s Will, not Tina.

All’s Well That Ends Well opened at Shakespeare and Company’s Founders theatre on June 20, 2008, and continues to August 31, 2008. Evening performances are at 8:00 p.m. and matinees are at 3:00 p.m. Tickets can be purchased by calling the box office at (413)-637-3353 or on the website at www.shakespeare.org.

(This review appeared in New Fairfield’s Citizen News on July 3, 2008)