As You Like It at
the Bay Street Theater
(L-R: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Hannah Cabell, and Andre de Shields in Much Ado About Nothing.)
John Doyle,
the director of the new production of As
You Like It at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre, is a genius at stripping
away the clutter to reveal the inner harmony of his chosen pieces – see his Sweeney Todd, Company, or The Color Purple,
all Tony winners for Best Revival, or his off-Broadway production, earlier this
year, of Pacific Overtures. It’s confusing, then, that this As You Like It, seemingly fun and
seemingly well-cast, is at its weakest when the stripping shows through. Mr. Doyle, who also designs the set, gives us
an effectively bare stage that never feels more than bare, and a reduced text
in which any passing aficionado of Shakespeare could note the edits. It’s a pretty small play as it is to be
reduced to a company of ten and a two-hour running time – and it shows.
The play is
a co-production of Classic Stage Company in New York, where it goes after
completing its run here on September 3rd, thus Mr. Doyle, the
artistic director at Classic Stage, thus Ellen Burstyn, as Jaques, the
depressive courtier, and Andre de Shields, as Touchstone, the clownish
sophisticate. Ms. Burstyn, presumably,
was attracted to the part in pursuit of Jaques’ immortal “All the world’s a
stage” speech, but it doesn’t stand out in her largely subdued
performance. The biggest reactions go
first to her wry observation that she can “suck the melancholy out of a song as
a weasel sucks eggs” and, second, her delivery of one of Shakespeare’s best
jokes, a dismissal of a mooning lover with a trenchant “You speak in blank
verse.”
Mr. de Shields, meanwhile, can’t
fully puncture the dated humor to deliver a satisfying buffoon, though he does
have a remarkably strong scene near then end, as an audience member is pulled
up onstage to play his rival in love, William.
(It’s a lot more satisfying than it sounds.) As he turns away from the befuddled spectator
on his exit, Mr. de Shields gifts us with a warm, almost nostalgic smile, a
subtle commentary on the ridiculousness of the conceit. The issue with our two star turns, I
conclude, is that Ms. Burstyn isn’t allowed to be a clown, and Mr. de Shields
isn’t allowed to be a sarcastic fly on the wall. Maybe some recasting is in order.
The story isn’t as impenetrable as in some Shakespeare comedies, merely multilayered, as set after set of misbegotten
lovers mistake identities and swoon at distant partners in the court-in-exile
of Duke Senior (Bob Stillman, genial) in the Forest of Arden. The only twist here is that Mr. Doyle has
recognized – wisely, in my opinion – the likeness of the play to a musical,
dotted as it is with the lyrics to songs Shakespeare himself wrote. The production puts them front and center, in
an arrangement not so much Jazz Age (as the literature at Bay Street suggests)
as Dust Bowl. The eminent Stephen
Schwartz is conscripted to write the music, which is promising, but they’re
rushed, under-amplified, and under-orchestrated, and the end result is
disappointing. With truly great songs
(as Mr. Schwartz, history shows, can write without undue effort), this could be
a great show. It’s not. It’s nice, but not great.
Where it’s nice, it’s because of earnestness
and commitment like that of the two female leads, Quincy Tyler Bernstine and
Hannah Cabell as cousins Celia and Rosalind.
Ms. Bernstine’s Celia is a perpetually aghast sidekick out of a romantic
comedy, while Ms. Cabell’s Rosalind is a wide-eyed innocent, who plays off her
co-star with aplomb. While not revolutionary, they’re at least consistently
funny. The production as a whole could
stand to adapt a little of their yin-and-yang interplay, as leaning too far on
the side of reduction – as Mr. Doyle does here – leaves us with, to borrow the
title of a different comedy, much ado about nothing.
