Shakespeare’s rom-com classic As You Like It filled the Grove with the sounds of merriment, silliness and slapstick at the Santa Cruz Shakespeare opening night. Playing for laughs, this production is spun as a crowd pleaser showcasing sit-com, vaudeville, and an interior gloss on Cyrano performed by a dazzlingly diverse company.
Somewhere in all of this there is the tale of a bold young noblewoman, Rosalind (an adroit Charlotte Munson), exiled from her royal home and dressed as a man, discovering confidence and freedom denied to women of her time. In the guise of a youth accompanied by the court fool Touchstone (Patty Gallagher), and her adoring friend Celia (a vivacious Anna Takayo), Rosalind finds herself free to make her own decisions. Elizabethan audiences must have swooned.
As You Like It is one of those Shakespearean entertainments involving noble brothers, a good Duke and an evil one (both played effectively by Raphael Nash Thompson), warring offspring and cross-dressing lovers. In the end there are lots of weddings and jolly singing and dancing. And to be sure we are entertained. Usually at the expense of poetry and insight.
It is both painful and hilarious to watch the intelligent woman Shakespeare created transform herself into a lovesick suitor of a similarly lovesick object. That object is the good Duke’s son Orlando (an effective Elliot Sagay).
Rosalind and Orlando fell in love back in court, but Orlando too escapes to the forest fleeing his evil brother (a smart turn by Charles Pasternak) and now meets Rosalind in her disguise as a man. Even if he doesn’t yet realize her true identity, Rosalind has a plan. She will teach him courtship that doesn’t rely on Hallmark clichés and stodgy social protocols. It will be hands-on, so to speak.
Both of them, in different ways are playing at (rehearsing?) lovemaking. But without more subtle staging there was no way to tell whether Rosalind remains a giddy girl or something more liberated and hence the sophisticated duplicity of her character gets lost. Some speeches however—clever, swift, and engagingly delivered—reveal cross-gendered Rosalind’s genius, and here is where Munson catches fire.
Opening night’s cast knew their lines but often delivered them as if they forgot they had headset amplification and felt the need to use 19th-century vocal techniques. Shakespeare’s ingenious words and colorful insights were underscored by panto gestures and elaborate burlesque, just in case we in the audience didn’t understand. For example, melancholy Jaques wrapping up his coat into a bundle, a visual cartoon of an infant in swaddling blanket, the first age of man as in the “all the world’s a stage” soliloquy.
Paige Lindsey White as Jaques, an exiled noble living in the Forest of Arden, adopts a persona somewhere between David Bowie and Basil Fawlty. Even though her delivery of this famous speech is odd, she is hard to resist. The impeccably confident White struts through her role making non sequitur pronouncements in the cynical tone diametrically opposite of Touchstone’s “motley mocker.”
Jaques provides bits of gravitas, often apropos of nothing, in the way that Touchstone provides comic relief. Exactly as Shakespeare intended, and yet at this point both the play itself, and some of the players, seemed to belong in a different sectors of the galaxy. (At this point I began to suspect that some players were unclear as to their characters.)
High praise for the brilliant music designer/performer David Coulter, whose bag of tricks—ranging from a shimmering musical saw to various pipes, whistles, drums, mouth harps, guitars, et al.—brought a magical sense of continuity and narrative to every scene.
Also contemporizing this production was the onstage presence of large racks of costumes and other stage props, as if to suggest that we were watching the play rehearse itself. But the sketchily equipped set was never explained. Two dress forms graffitied with Rosalind’s name and lines of love poetry were intended to portray the trees of Arden upon which Orlando carves his declarations of love for Rosalind. In key scenes intelligibility seemed sacrificed for novelty. But the endless clowning of genius clown Patty Gallagher kept the crowd in stitches. Lots of stitches.
The director opted to make Shakespeare’s broad silliness even broader, to the extent that Patty Gallagher ends up (I won’t tell you where) barking orders to her ditsy paramour Audrey (Jomar Tagatac in baby doll drag). Major crowd pleaser.
Praise to the warring odd couple, starry-eyed Phoebe (Chelsea Rose) who loves Orlando, and her eager suitor Silvius (Justin Joung). These two worked their way through a brisk comedy of errors, wooing and arguing and knowing exactly who their characters were and what they wanted. Costuming here offered mega-optics reminiscent of a Billie Eilish concert. Kudos to costumer Pamela Rodriguez-Montero.
A trip to the Grove, watching vivacious players working through some prime wordplay, is always a pleasure: “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets,” Rosalind advises one feckless character. She also proclaims the play’s subtext: “Love is merely a madness.” Phrases in use today were invented here 400 years ago—“too much of a good thing,” “forever and a day” and “newfangled.”
The uncanny and inventive sound design of Coulter, a musician who has performed and produced with Tom Waits, Kronos Quartet, Yoko Ono and Wes Anderson, is one of the big reasons why you need to see this production. A full moon and a stageful of action heroes—comic and romantic—are a few more.
There’s plenty of time for the needed fine-tuning since As You Like It runs through Sept. 1 in the Audrey Stanley Grove, Santa Cruz. santacruzshakespeare.org
