The Winter’s Tale - American Players Theatre - 08/27/2025

We seem to be living in a Sicilian golden age. Having had the unique experience of seeing two terrific productions of The Winter’s Tale in one calendar week – one in Stratford, ON, one in Spring Green, WI – it’s hard not to think the first three acts of the play are the best domestic drama this side of Eugene O’Neill. While not meaning to compare between the two, each version in its own way finds a special excellence through the acts set in Sicily, while Bohemia remains doomed to be a tougher assignment. 

In APT’s production, directed by Shana Cooper, Nate Burger as Leontes takes the reins and creates a brilliantly sensitive and sweaty monarch whose own intellectual genius ends up being the downfall of himself, his family, and his nation. Cooper’s production is gently modern in a way reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited and that certain school of British academia-chic. While suits-and-ties sit oddly with Shakespeare’s play in which everyone is praying to Apollo, having the character of Time (Sarah Day) begin the play by using her “wings” (here, the imagined hands of a clock) helps telegraph that we are watching a “tale” more than a realistic docu-fiction. Amidst a great ensemble, Burger makes every tangled, knotty thought of Leontes clear, digestible, and appropriately upsetting, which by its very nature justifies the production’s existence. Particularly his painful attempt to right his wrongs after the carnage of the trial of Hermione (Laura Rook, characteristically great) lands as devastatingly pathetic. 

Rook is as imposing as you'd expect from her body of work, and makes a brilliant choice when in the trial scene you can tell from her reactions that she didn’t know prior to that very public moment that her newborn daughter was “cast out” to the mercy of the elements. She smartly justifies Hermione’s frustration with the demanding Mamilius (Elijah Quigley, at the performance I saw) to be the result not of matronly coldness but of morning-sickness; Hermione after all is pregnant with the nascent Perdita. Earlier, her “what, have I twice said well?” nails the queen’s loving irony. And later, her improvisatory actions in her own legal defense showcase the extra-cruelty of Leontes in regards to her imagined affair with Polixenes (La Shawn Banks). 

Banks is the best Polixenes in living memory. Very goofy (then scary) in Bohemia, the level of world-weariness he brings to this notably purple-passage is stunning:

We were, fair queen,

Two lads that thought there was no more beyond

But such a day tomorrow as today,

And to be boy eternal.

Cooper’s changing of ‘behind’ to ‘beyond’ is notable enough, but Banks never wallows in the dialogue’s idyllic beauty, but proves he knows such a world is not recapturable. Rarely do you see a Polixenes who starts off with this much tread on the tires. While I wish the opening “movement piece” between Leontes and Polixenes had been more literal and less jarringly expressionistic (choreography by Erika Chong Shuch), the nostalgia the two kings both feel for Leontes “green velvet coat” is a fun insert. 

A review of this production seems to demand a catalogue of praises for the company’s members. Gavin Lawrence is incredibly easy to buy as a wise dignitary and compatriot: his Camillo likely has a military background. Sun Mee Chomet brings great post-natal feeling to the servant Emilia, and Rassell Holt nails the earnest gravity of Antigonus: his bear-mauling death-screams are disturbing in the best way. (Speaking of which, while I don’t know how the lights and fog would work on a sunny Sunday afternoon, that bear was scarier than it had any right to be.) Dee Dee Batteast as Paulina makes no bones about referring repeatedly to Leontes as a “tyrant,” and brings necessary wry sarcasm to the self-deprecating references to her supposed “rashness of a woman.” David Daniel’s Old Shepherd delightfully uses “a pretty one” to answer his own question about the infant being “a boy or a child?” and even Cleomenes and Dion are fun in their own bumpkiny way (as played by David Alan Anderson and Nathan Barlow). 

Tale as told as time: the scenes in Bohemia are just not as riveting as the ones in Sicilia. Whatever its bucolic, visual charms, Bohemia just has a habit of outstaying its welcome. Marcus Truschinksi is enjoyably rakish as the rogue Autolycus, and the first song of the sheep-shearing festival is delightful in its romp and added references to mosquitoes. But I dare anyone to care about Camillo getting Florizel and Perdita on a boat to Sicilia as much as they do about Hermione’s trial. The first part of The Winter’s Tale excels because it has no exposition: Shakespeare drops you into the twisted psyche of Leontes and expects you to swim or perish. Thus, the end of Act 4 demands that we deal with our young lovers (Xavier Edward King and Molly Martinez-Collins) getting back to Leontes’ court so the play’s big reunion can be effectively achieved. Shakespeare’s narrative strategy ends up being curiously bottom-heavy. Despite having also played Florizel at the Goodman Theatre in 2019, King adds too many subliminal modern tags to his language to ever be fully endearing, though the montage sequence where we see the new love of the younger generation preparing for their voyage, contrasted with the stationary pain of Burger’s older generation, is quite moving. 

If a catalogue of actors is tolerable, hopefully a compendium of smaller moments is acceptable:

The eeriness of a shadowy Hermione appearing to Antigonus. Hermione practicing palmistry on Polixenes in the midst of their “pinching fingers.” Mamilius worrying about his dad as he claims “I am like you they say.” Leontes genuinely doubting himself with “thou dost make possible things not so held.” Burger and Rook’s upsettingly long kiss before Hermione’s exit with Polixenes. The earth-consuming devastation of “it is a bawdy PLANET” and “Your eyeglass / Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn.” André Pluess’ heartstring-tugging sound design. The audience laughing when Polixenes and Camillo bring up the newfound richness of the Old Shepherd (sometimes just understanding Shakespeare’s plotting is enough to make you chuckle). 

All riches aside, I wouldn’t say Cooper lands the plane. The presentation of Hermione’s statue is too clunky, and the assembled not impressed enough by her revivifying, for the ending to be ideally affecting. Mamilius’ reappearance after an extended moment where Hermione decides to exit hand-in-hand with Leontes is a reasonable button to the action, but ends up not saying all that much. 

I also don’t know why Leontes’ “spider” speech was cut, or how Paulina knows about the Camillo/Polixenes poisoning plot when she wasn’t present for its revelation. But let’s put quibbling aside. Cooper’s production may not play as much of the piano as Antoni Cimolino’s Stratford production did, but at its best nails a more limited range, and is absolute catnip for the Shakespeare kid’s soul. This version justifies itself in such moments as when we see Nate Burger reacting through pain to the sounds of his baby daughter crying but still demanding that his lackeys “carry this female bastard hence.” Also through such memorable staging inventions as when we see Leontes begin to choke Hermione during the trial scene, a choice we think might tip the play’s sympathy balance much too far, but then find that Hermione ends up encouraging him to continue the violence after he relents, as she proves her “fear to die” has been untimely killed. 

Clearly we’re in the midst of a Winter’s Tale bumper crop, and let’s decide it’s exciting that a definitive Bohemia has yet to be harvested.

Macbeth - Stratford Festival - 08/22/2025

Is there a heart to this Macbeth? I’m not convinced. Robert Lepage usually excels at the good-faith, high-tech, theatrical extravaganza, and is generally easy-to-clear against charges of empty spectacle. His use of cinematic techniques in a live setting can be stunning. His father-son autobiography 887 was one of the best things I’ve seen on a stage, his Coriolanus (also at Stratford) was a thrilling visual and textual reconsideration of a knotty tragedy, and his opera of The Tempest found superlative magical fantasy with no wires visible.

In Macbeth, every wire is visible. But rather than being thin and sleek, the wires take the form of huge, lumbering platforms upon which stand a towering motel complex, where much of the show’s action is set. They creak when they move and they move slowly and often. They are also operated by largely visible stagehands in head-sets. In this world, Macbeth’s castle of Inverness is a seedy roadside motel which is represented in mutli-level detail. I can appreciate the scale of the vision, and also wanting the emotionality of the play to live in huge scenic components, but I can’t imagine this is the ideal outcome Lepage had in mind. When manipulated during scene changes, the things are just too cumbersome to watch. Surely the goal was more transitional flair. 

Lepage sets his Macbeth in the world of a modern biker gang (very Hell’s Angels). Recontextualizing Shakespeare is often fun and daring, but this socially-specific setting ends up being a real head-scratcher. Not to be that guy, but many things just translate so badly in this milieu. As presented here, the culture of “bikers honor” is so opaque as to be unintelligible. We have no faith that Macbeth (Tom McCamus) is any worse a leader than Duncan (David Collins), particularly when the show begins with us seeing the traitorous Thane of Cawdor executed by Duncan’s forces with cinderblocks chained to his ankles and being thrown into a river. The image is spiffy in its staging, but it establishes that in this Sons of Anarchy world, brutality is the law of the land. We’re brought into a theatrical universe where caring about the tortured psyche of the uniquely brilliant but violent Macbeth becomes impossible. We also have zero faith that Malcolm (Austin Eckert) becoming “king” at play’s end will have any restorative effect: they’ll just go on being bikers, and why in an already violent subculture Macbeth inspired so much animosity remains confounding. 

The hewing of Birnam Wood feels comically out-of place: the foliage doth not mask your Harley. While the show doesn’t spell it out for us as to whether the three weird sisters (Aidan DeSalaiz, Paul Dunn, and Anthony Palermo) are meant to be drag queens or trans sex workers, either way the context is uncomfortably represented. The fact that the incantations of “double, double, toil and trouble” are invoked in a locale resembling a hospital garbage dump, and the visions that Macbeth gleans from the witches’ prophecies are so obviously psycho-hallucinogenic, makes Macbeth’s belief in their supernatural prowess all the more perplexing. This production goes so far out of its way to downplay any element of the supernatural, that Macbeth’s belief in prophecy feels anachronistically wrong-headed, not to mention his blind-spot for the possibility of running into someone born by C-section.  

For a director with such technical agency, the show runs away from anything that could be considered “magical”: all is hyper-literal. Macbeth needs to see a dagger, so a dagger is digitally rendered within a window’s screen. The Thanes are bikers, so onto the stage atop their HOGs they ride. For such a mechanistically ornate production, the result falls quite flat. Surely the director of Cirque du Soleil’s Ka could have managed more fun along the way.

Three moments popped (with reservation): Lady Macbeth falling off the balcony during “tomorrow and tomorrow” was effectively eerie; the smash-cut from the gas station of Banquo’s murder to the BBQ-feast hosted by Macbeth (clothed in a ‘King of the Grill’ apron) was fun, though wildly pleased with itself; and seeing the Thane of Cawdor descend to his watery grave would have been awesome, had the moment not been marred by Lepage inserting movie-style credit projections as part of the show’s opening, a choice that couldn't feel more tacky. 

McCamus is a fine actor, but his Macbeth never gets across the footlights. Admittedly, the soliloquy convention sits uncomfortably amidst such hyper-modern machismo, but the interiority of McCamus’s Macbeth feels addressed only to himself, and almost never to his audience. Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth manages to both engage with her audience and bring sparkling clarity, even amidst such heavy directorial interference. Thus, while there is a visual charm to their grizzled ambition, never once do you feel guilty for feeling badly for their plight: you basically – often literally – watch them through glass. 

All the performers suffer from a labored sense of pacing: lots of sentences have air enough to run a Triumph through. For a short tragedy with crackjack plotting, this Macbeth is not a nail-biter. 

Some actors do fine. Tom Rooney gives a moving rendition of the moment when he as Macduff finds out his family has been murdered. However, Lepage screws this up too by cutting the actual murder scene of Lady Macduff and Son, and turns out you really need that to care about Macduff’s grief and revenge against Macbeth. Basically, Rooney gives a good Macduff in a vacuum. Maria Vacratsis fares the best of any performer, as a front-desk Porter of the Inverness motel, and is both funny in her ribaldry and sweet in her concern for Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking. Vacratsis gives us a Porter straight out of the Coen Brothers universe, and is a welcome ray of light. 

That being said, why would you cast heavy-hitters like Graham Abbey as Banquo or André Sills as Ross if you’re just going to smother them in “concept?” But I must say, I see you Emilio Vieira (Lennox), and I support every emotionally nuanced character you’ve created at the Festival thus far, and may you have many more shining opportunities to show your talents on its various stages.

If Lepage didn’t want us to take his concept literally he shouldn’t have rendered his show so completely lacking in the figurative. A biker gang is an emotionally chilly place to set a Shakespeare tragedy, as their petty squabbles can’t really be said to have international consequences. I’ll always thrill to a director completely overhauling a text and making you think you’re watching the story for the first time, but this Macbeth is misguided and undercooked. Rather than being complicit to acts of violent horror by the brainiac king and queen of fictional murderers, we are subject to an insular, hermetic, and clunky piece of theatre-tech that doesn’t justify its operating cost. 

May Lepage arise refreshed from his rest.

The Winter’s Tale - Stratford Festival - 08/22/2025

The first half of Antoni Cimolino’s production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Tom Patterson Theatre is basically perfect. I say this not to complain about weaknesses in the second half, just to explicitly appreciate what occurs before intermission. The texture and nuance the ensemble brings to Shakespeare’s language under Cimolino’s direction pulls off a magic trick: through the love and detail of the cast’s characterizations and psycho-elocution, this production manages to make The Winter’s Tale sing as both a cosmic Greco-Roman myth and also a taut and a searing chamber drama. 

The story deals with the chaos wrought when the (initially) good King Leontes (Graham Abbey) is driven mad with senseless jealousy by the idea his wife, Queen Hermione (Sara Topham) is having an affair with his best friend, Polixines (André Sills), the King of Bohemia. She isn’t, but Leontes is so certain of his suspicion that he causes both Polixines and Camillo (Tom Rooney), friend and advisor, to flee the country. Also, Leontes declares his recently-born daughter to be illegitimate (she isn’t), and casts her forth to be eaten by crows. The show-trial of his wife’s guilt ends up being so stressful it causes the death of the son of Leontes and Hermione, the promising young Mamillius (George Robinet, at the performance I saw). Immediately thereafter, we witness the grief-induced demise of Hermione. Leontes ends the first half of the play with no wife, no son, no daughter, and a nation wracked in the midst of his self-inflicted familial carnage. He will spend the next sixteen years doing penance under the watchful eye of Paulina (Yanna McIntosh), until events conspire for some divine intervention.  

All this trauma leads to one of the most razor-sharp intellectual thrillers in classical literature (at least before the bathroom break). Time has come for Shakespeareans to recognize The Winter’s Tale is no longer “underrated” or a “hidden gem” but a play that has justly made its way onto the hot B-list of Shakespearean production (I’m seeing three renditions this August alone). Like with Richard II, many Shakespeare lovers and scholars are wholly alike in thinking their passion for The Winter’s Tale makes them unique. Luckily, the fandom is deserved, and Cimolino’s version makes as eloquent a case as you could hope for in regards to its popularity. (Shakespearean taste always varies by era; in the 19th century Henry VIII was a blockbuster, which today feels perplexing.) 

Abbey and Topham in particular essentially have honorary DFAs in verse speaking, as they are able to mold and articulate the language to doctoral proportions. Abbey walks us through every step in Leontes’ upsetting journey and we become complicit in our understanding of his irrationality. The scene where Leontes attempts to convince Camillo to poison Polixines is so finely-spun as to be terrifying. All the lords attending on Leontes in the Sicilian court deserve acclaim: David Collins, Paul Dunn, Tarique Lewis, and Dakota Jamal Wellman, all intelligently populate the group of men attempting to dissuade Leontes from his insanity, and having a strong chorus of reasoned voices benefits the play immeasurably. The quality of the listening in the audience was so high that people could be heard gasping when Leontes instructed Antigonus to throw his newborn in the fire, and laughing when Polixines talks about his son passing time at the cottage of a “most homely shepherd,” so easily did they grasp the aural storytelling.

At the start of the second half, the character of Time (Seana McKenna) uses her pleasingly angelic wings to push the story sixteen years into its future, and causes us to spend time with a newer Bohemian generation (one can imagine this Time announcing “The great work begins”). I would never claim the second half of this play is rendered unsuccessfully. I only suspect most directors fundamentally have a Sicilian bias. In the way that many fans of the movie Full Metal Jacket love the basic training section with the drill sergeant played by R. Lee Ermey and then concoct reasons as to why the later Vietnam sequences are in the film, most directors of The Winter’s Tale fall in love with Sicilia and learn to tolerate Bohemia. Sicilia invariably feels like the star with Bohemia as supporting act. This is not inherently wrong, only some day I would like to meet a theatrical artist whose love for the play had its inception with Bohemia and then grew outwards. Though all this really means is that we might be doomed to excellent Sicilias (at least occasionally), and Bohemias that feel marginally less inspired (and clearly this review is under that same spell). 

But there are still highlights in these sunnier climes. Marissa Orjalo does a terrific job as the lost-princess Perdita, especially in her long discourse about the metaphorical significance of flowers. This scene is a tough one to find charming, but Orjalo inhabits the pastoral regality of Perdita in such a way that you see her, even in Bohemia and at such a remove, being Hermione’s daughter. Such lineage is also apparent in her banter with Sills’ Polixines, who clearly gets a whiff of the Queen he once knew in this seemingly low-born country lass. 

The only real strike against the Bohemian scenes is the satyr dance during the sheep-shearing: just because it’s textually supported doesn’t mean a director should jump at the chance to include a phallic jig: we already get we’re in the “rural” part of the play. Even the plot with the vagabond Autolycus (Geraint Wyn Davies) makes a fun and credible case for itself, though you wish that strain of characters (Autolycus, plus the Shepherd and the Clown) all could have been included in the final scene of revelation. Making room for the adopted family would have been nice. 

Which brings us to the scene that all productions of The Winter’s Tale get judged by: did you make us cry at the awakening of Hermione’s statue? I’d say this one was laudable. The effect of the statue coming to life is helped by some hand-held lanterns (lighting design by Michael Walton) being the only light sources for a while, and thus it’s easier to imagine seeing the “marble” at which the characters believe they’re looking. If ever there were two actors who could marry the bitter with the redemptive, it’s Topham and Abbey. 

Though even after this celestial reunion, Cimolino’s production ends with Time accompanying Mamilius back onto the stage, to remind Leontes that, whatever the powers of divine grace and redemption, there are some wrongs that can never be righted. Cimolino also began the play with Time prompting Mamilius to “tell us a tale,” and along the way, showed us a folkloric saga that also has a surprising kinship with both Jung and Pinter. 

All in all, the production is as gripping a version of the late-period romance as you could ever hope to see. Victory in Shakespearean staging often looks like leaning forward in your seat and watching much of the action through a haze of “tears that sacred pity hath engendered” (as the author says in another play). This show very much accomplishes that, and leaves you thrilled and moved. Ultimately, quibbling over Sicilian versus Bohemian inspiration is likely critical covetousness.

As You Like It - Stratford Festival - 08/21/25

Chris Abraham’s As You Like It has a lot more gunshot deaths than you’d expect. The director’s production on the Festival Stage in Stratford, Ontario begins a plot (which will end in a quadruple-wedding) with a group of itinerant workers laboring under firearm-enforced Draconian supervision. Orlando (Christopher Allen) has been shafted of his inheritance by his elder brother Oliver (Andrew Chown) after their late father’s death. Oliver is now forcing Orlando to work as a beast of burden under harsh and, in Abraham’s production, violent conditions. Oliver’s estate resembles a factory-farm staffed by migrant laborers where the failure to achieve your daily quota could be death. Oliver has clearly taken notes on sibling usurpation from Duke Fredrick (Sean Arbuckle), who has recently deposed his sister (in this version) Duchess Senior (Seana McKenna), and taken over her rule. Frederick too is constantly surrounded by guards with machine-guns, and thus the early parts of this production, particularly with the almost-constantly falling-snow of the first act, cause us to see these characters as inhabiting a cruel and dismal world that has no time for romance or self-discovery. 

But this is as it should be. As You Like It is a comedy best served tough. The delights experienced by Rosalind (Sara Farb) and Celia (Makambe K. Simamba) in the rough-but-hearty forest of Arden don’t mean much if their homelife is already a water-color idyll. Abraham placing the first half of the play in a contemporary puritanical dystopia almost seems more germane than doing the play in Elizabethan garb, and certainly more organic than the play’s setting of origin (does anyone even remember we’re technically in France?). Starting us in a darker place that gets to move to the light when the characters inhabit Arden and its freedoms gives us somewhere to go. While this As You Like It may not be a rollicking crowd-pleaser, I dare anyone to find any laugh as written by Shakespeare to which it gives short-shrift. The darkness of the early scenes aside, As You Like It is the most affable play Shakespeare ever wrote, and something about the journey out of hostility makes us enjoy the amiable hang-out components all the more. 

Abraham’s direction loses focus once we’re planted in Arden. More attention could have been paid to the whys and wherefores of the love-game Rosalind constructs for Orlando: in Cheek By Jowl’s famous all-male production, Rosalind concocted the idea after being disappointed the love of her life didn’t recognize her as disguised in her male persona of ‘Ganymede’. Farb is too detailed a performer not to be clearly going on some journey with the ruse, but why Rosalind needs to go through such an elaborate scheme is a bit opaque. You also feel like Abraham just wasn’t as interested in the “country copulatives” as he was in building the wintry mix of the earlier acts. The characterizations of supporting roles like William (Leon Qin), Audrey (Silvae Mercedes), and Phoebe (Jessica B. Hill) feel painted with large brushstrokes, which is especially too bad for Hill, normally a tremendous performer, who never appears fully comfortable as the firebrand shepherdess. Though Hiro Kanagawa brings effortless gravitas and charm to the role of Corin, often an anonymous walk-on. 

In spite of any weaknesses along the way, fundamentally Abraham’s manifesto of the play is guided by a true and feeling recognition of the drama’s heart. This heart is manifest in many ways throughout the show. Seeing Celia’s joy at finding Orlando’s poem on the tree is one. Jacques (Aaron Krohn) actually deciding to stick around for the final wedding song and its festivity is another. And truly the best moments of pure As You Like It revelation come from two of the Act 5 costumes created by designer Julie Fox: the greenery worn by John Ng as Adam/Hymen perfectly shows that the final marriages are presided over by the loving personification of the very spirit of the forest itself; and the makeshift dresses worn by Celia and in particular Rosalind, whose wedding gown looks like it was cobbled together out of Ikea bags with bubble wrap serving as her veil, manages to show the homely but joyous origins of love amidst a rustic landscape. Rarely does a costume choice move you to tears, but these were both such marvelous strokes of the sewing needle. 

Did Le Beau need to get shot point blank, or Celia to have a sex dream? I don’t know, but I appreciate that choices were made (I also can’t claim to know why Charles was wrestling “for Rosalind” instead of “for his credit”). And ultimately, I’m delighted composers Ron Sexsmith and Thomas Ryder Payne got to explore the sonic landscape of the play through Shakespeare’s greatest tunes. The communal “friendsgiving” at the end of Shakespeare’s Act 2, where all of Senior’s “merry men” sit down to an improvised feast, and Amiens (Gabriel Antonacci) blesses the assembled with “Blow, blow thou winter wind,” was as moving and bittersweet a delight as you could ask for. 

Plotlessness aside, no play of Shakespeare’s creates such a loving and inviting universe. Abraham clearly understands what makes As You Like It special, as it's one of the few plays the Bard wrote where you could conceivably say “I’d like to live in that play.” I know I’d choose the forest of Arden over mushy Illyria or the surveillance state of Messina. Abraham’s rendering of As You Like It creates a community between the performers and the audience, reminding us that even though “we have seen better days,” a better world is possible through the emergent properties of hope and resilience.

As You Like It is the ultimate Shakespearean comfort food. Somehow or another, I plan on watching it on my deathbed.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream - American Players Theatre - 08/17/2025

A Midsummer Night's Dream is an underrated play. Despite it being maybe the most often-produced comedy in the world, the most beloved item of family entertainment in classical literature, and one of the most adapted and pictorially represented works of the most famous playwright of all time, by and large its joys are still underestimated. The problems endemic to productions of the Dream stem from directors' inability to fuse the A-plot with the B-plot. They may grasp the youthful passion and insanity of the four lovers, and they may appreciate the wacky antics of the 'rude mechanicals' putting on their play, but usually their understanding of how these two plots merge ends once Bottom's donkey's head has been removed. Why these two threads of forest-based psychedelic romance and amateur community theatricals live in the same play almost never gets resolved. We usually see the play-within-the-play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' as the story's after-dinner-digestive: pleasing, but clearly not the star protein. 

This lack of imagination gives the Dream the reputation of light, positive entertainment; movie theater buttered popcorn at the Shakespeare-plex. The ideal kids intro to Shakespeare. However, if read carefully, not only is the play fun, fantastical, delightful, and all the attributes that make it so popular, but also profoundly life-affirming in an uncommon way. Through their crazy night in the forest, Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander, are all gifted the opportunity to expend the growing pains of adolescence in a single evening. And through experiencing the highs and lows of the theatrical process, Bottom, Quince, and the rest of the mechanicals, all learn there is joy to be found within the act of creating something as an artistic team, whose power is greater than the sum of its parts. And then by witnessing the mechanicals perform 'Pyramus and Thisbe', the four lovers realize that the revelations one has after one has been drugged by the fairies, and endured what you could call a 'bright night of the soul', doesn't need such a fanciful setting in order to occur. Sometimes, such revelations can come about simply by experiencing communal storytelling with your loved ones, and that by witnessing such art with your romantic partner, you actually forge a stronger inter-personal connection. Fictional voyages taken as a team, whether via fairy influence or in a playhouse setting, have real-world ramifications. Experiencing stories with your loved ones helps you love them better.  

In Act 5 of the Dream, Nick Bottom is strutting and fretting his way through the tragic bathos of Pyramus, who believes his love, Thisbe, to have recently met her end via lion attack. In the audience, Duke Theseus snidely remarks: "this passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad." Rather than doubling-down on his wryness, Duchess Hippolyta simply admits "beshrew my heart, but I pity the man." Hippolyta opening up about her emotional experience paves the way for Francis Flute to nail his final soliloquy as Thisbe over Pyramus's corpse, and the genuine pathos the audience feels is organically led to the concluding bergomask dance that ends the evening with celebratory catharsis. By watching this play, the recently married Theseus and Hippolyta learn something about each other, and solidify their marriage in a way that otherwise wouldn't have happened. However silly the entertainment, fiction brought about a unique emotional proximity. The newlyweds needed to experience 'Pyramus and Thisbe' to flourish as loving couples, and that's why Shakespeare gave us both the A-plot and the B-plot. 

I realize I have talked for a long time without even mentioning the production I am claiming to 'review', and that's only because it is vital we be on the same page that A Midsummer Night's Dream is not 'fun': it is wise and warm and soulful in the kind of way that soothes the brain and grasps the body in a long embrace to confirm that the life you've lived hasn't been an idle failure but instead one nourished by joy and connection and that when you die you'll have a funeral filled with love and eloquence. That is to what productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream should aspire.  

So. How does director David Daniel's production at American Players Theatre do in that regard? All in all, not bad. The main sin on display here is the pacing. Like many actors who turn to directing, Daniel has the habit of encouraging over-relished words at the expense of dexterous thoughts. Thus, while we hear Shakespeare's language spoken with care and feeling, it largely lacks the propulsive drive needed to remind us we are watching events happening under a deadline. Daniel's production ends up being so affable that I doubt the lack of a motor will bother many theatregoers, but the first half especially sags under the weight of too many individual turns-of-phrase feeling like they're all coming gift-wrapped from Tiffany's; the preciousness is an unnecessary weight. 

A useful canary/coal mine test to see if any production of the Dream is operating in good faith is the interpretation of Helena and Demetrius. Do we feel good about them ultimately, and trust that Helena's passion is placed upon an ethically adequate object, or do we think Demetrius will be spending his days under the influence of a mystical roofie? Here, as with the show in general, Daniel's heart is basically in the right place, with some imaginative limitations. Both Maggie Cramer (as Helena) and Josh Krause (as Demetrius) are incredibly strong performers who do their best to plant the seeds of a real relationship between the two even in the earlier forest scenes. However, Daniel is unwilling to mine the BDSM interplay that exists between these characters, which ends up limiting the possible joy we could be feeling via their unique love language. This places an unfair burden on Cramer who ends up having to make lines like "I am your spaniel, and Demetrius, / The more you beat me, I will fawn on you" sound like Helena apologizing for her feelings, rather than an unapologetic and resounding confirmation of a physical history that exists between these two. The "love-in-idleness" potion is not a zero-sum game: for some people it makes them less of their real self, for some people it takes away inhibitions, and for some people it allows them truer access to their authentic personhood. When Demetrius eventually proclaims his love for Helena in the broad light of day, the potion's influence is immaterial: we should know he is speaking his inner truth, which earlier in the play he found embarrassing because of the overwhelming power of its intensity. Helena is a tornado in which any man would be lucky to get swept away, but under Daniel's direction, the two don't have the wild anarchy that would make them most loveable. Though Krause, under the love-juice's influence, parroting back "goddess, nymph, divine and rare, / Precious, celestial" as Cramer feeds him the compliments is a sweet moment where we believe in the positive case for Helena and Demetrius. Also, Krause's swelling speech to Theseus about how his love for Hermia "melted as the snow" succeeds in feeling genuine and earned and not ending their trajectory on a sour note. They both fare as well as they can, under the circumstances.

Where Daniel comes closest to finding the real heart of the Dream is in the reactions the nobility has to 'Pyramus and Thisbe.' They clearly find it affecting, and enjoy it based on its own terms. This isn't the marriage-solidifying optimism of the text, but it's quite funny when Hermia (Samantha Newcomb) is unpacking the play's ending, says "moonshine and lion are left to bury the dead," and Cramer's Helena adds "aye.....and Wall, too??" Her good-natured but bewildered elucidation of the unique theatrical world-building she has just witnessed is hilarious. While I wish the nobles could have better shown the effect of the play on their identities as couples and not just as individuals, the ensuing bergomask, which starts with Bottom asking Hippolyta to dance, and then swells into class-blurring revelry, is enough to bring a smile to anyone's face. The dance could have continued much longer before its iron-tongued interruption -- a few seconds longer and it would have been enchanting -- but this moment is the closest the production comes to achieving sublime lift-off. The fact that it doesn't get there means it's only charming, rather than celestial. 

Jim DeVita as Oberon brings a nice warmer texture to the king of the fairies by so obviously feeling the pain of Helena. His reunion with Queen Titania (Elizabeth Ledo) was amusing without being too distracting: no one ever really knows how to justify Oberon claiming after he's woken Titania up from her ass-head encounter that "thou and I are new in amity." It too demands a level of rigorous joy directors are apt to fight shy of, or throw up their hands in the face of it. Here, you basically think "what's a little night-time mischief between two immortal beings?" and sense that in the next epoch Titania will give as good as she got. DeVita's reassurances of the audience with "...as I can take it with another herb" and "I am invisible" also brought needed humor to an imperious role. (Though one wishes Daniel would have allowed Ledo to discover the visual landscape of the "forgeries of jealousy" aria more, here it comes off too pre-digested.) 

All the mechanicals do yeoman's work. They convince us the real crime of these working class artisans is not incompetence, but pretension. Their antics are funny not because they're flubbing lines or tripping over scenery or doing other things no non-lobotomized actor would ever do, but because through their dunder-headed literalness they actually bumble their way into the avant-garde: "hmm, we can't actually bring in a wall, so someone's going to have to play a wall, I guess..." As Tom Snout/Wall, Nate Burger breathes great life into a few lines of dialogue, and also a noted sense of Cronenbergian body-horror as he finds himself transformed by the partition he's inhabiting. One expects this Snout fancies himself the Athenian Daniel Day-Lewis. The blossoming romance of Bottom (Sam Luis Massaro) and Quince (Sun Mee Chomet) is one of the production's highlights, along with how Daniel guides the mechanicals towards finding their collective voice as an ensemble: ridiculous, but, aesthetically-speaking, serious as a heart-attack. You almost wish the show ended with the triumphant smooch of Bottom and Quince, so amiable is their love, forged in the crucible of theatrical production.   

Attention must also be paid to the brilliant moment in Theseus and Hippolyta's second scene together, when Melisa Pereyra (Hippolyta) uses her speech about hunting with Hercules and Cadmus as a way to become closer with her fiance Theseus, played by Marcus Truschinski. The way Pereyra suggestively articulated her classical scenery, and how Truschinski received the information and became unduly excited by the way in which it hit close to home, was a moment of real textual insight. That the actors and Daniel find a totally positive reading of these two personages is genuinely refreshing, and just hearing an actor like Truschinski recite the "lovers and madmen" speech has an auditory pleasure all its own.

Nothing inherently wrong exists in casting Puck as two actors (Joshua M. Castille and Casey Hoekstra), though one wishes that device could have taken better advantage of the two sides of the character's personality: the mischievous trickster ("Puck") and the caring young man he grows into ("Robin Goodfellow"). If that isn't considered, he just seems like a weird elvish guy who's the same at the end of the story as he is at the start. Via the presence of Castille, APT's continued dedication to placing ASL alongside Shakespearean verse remains an exciting and necessary venture, which will hopefully continue to expand in ways currently unimagined.  

(We are also manifesting larger roles for Tim Gittings in the future, as his accomplishments as Philostrate, including being shanghaied into a choral role in 'Pyramus and Thisbe', remain stalwart as ever, and in this case, a perfectly fun way to get a sour character onto the side of joy.)

The production's weaknesses are largely of omission rather than commission. All the performances are strong, and the results are charming. The fact that it never gets airborne hardly makes it unique, though it could have been aided by having its verse articulation be less stately and measured and loved-to-death. At least it doesn't try and convince you A Midsummer Night's Dream is actually a dark and creepy play (we are spared such injustice). I may think it could have made a stronger case for joy, but sometimes being in the verbal presence of Shakespeare's words, particularly in the uniquely beautiful Spring Green amphitheater, creates its own self-sustaining justification. Until next time, we'll have to wait for a totalizing all-encompassing interpretation that "bodies forth / The forms of things unknown" and "gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name." The "most rare vision" exists as written by Shakespeare, but the full assignment remains unfulfilled in our current era.

Romeo and Juliet & The Comedy of Errors - Great River Shakespeare Festival (07/05/2025)

Before it turns tragic, Romeo and Juliet is one of the all-time great hangout plays. The contents of Shakespeare's acts one and two, with Juliet's poetry, Mercutio's ramblings, Romeo's imagination, the Nurse's ribaldry, Capulet's joviality, and many other items, all make it one of the most amiable dramatic couches on which to crash. Rio Bravo has nothing on fair Verona. The first two-fifths of Shakespeare's great apprentice tragedy are a delightful comedy-in-miniature, and at the Great River Shakespeare Festival, under the direction of H. Adam Harris, those early scenes are really quite pleasant to be around. A huge part of this is thanks to Serena Phillip as Juliet, who makes the text both strikingly clear and muscular. As the Capulet's daughter, Philip's trajectory in the play from child, to fiance, to wife, to widow, proves as indelible a journey as any dramatist has provided a creation. Her presence onstage is always welcome and appreciated. 

This leads us to a bit of critical awkwardness. At the performance I saw, Romeo was played by understudy Denzel Dejournette. Understudies are the unsung heroes of the theatrical industry (especially according to themselves), and often don't get paid until the technical process begins (if you see one in the building during the second week of rehearsals, you are, economically-speaking, in rarified air). All in all, Dejournette was not ready to provide an equal foil to Phillip's Juliet, and thus the air was largely out of the production's sails. In addition to the presence of several understudies, this seemed to be a performance where a number of practical effects just plain went wrong: knives accidentally fell from scabbards, poison canisters were dropped, the center set-piece was wobbly, lines were flubbed, headdresses toppled from performers' brows, and the lovers’ kissing was "marked" rather than actualized (the last was genuinely puzzling; shouldn't the intimacy be rehearsed as part of the understudy's track?) That being said, Dejournette got by reasonably well in the first half, as the vibes were just so good: the balcony scene was effortlessly charming, even if you wish he inhabited the language with more surety. Also, the light frustration he found with Benvolio (Clay Cooper at my performance, another understudy) and Mercutio (Diana Coates) via the innocuous line "good morrow to you both" was genuinely charming.

Director Harris frames the production as a "memory play" narrated by the Nurse (Stephane Lambourn), though this is an interpretation largely available to us through his program note. Lambourn is a strong performer, and her passion for her adopted-daughter, Juliet, is never in question. But Harris's focus on the Nurse's personal grief at the story's events directs the play too far away from its central conflict, which is how the elder generation so often fails the younger. The decidedly tragic acts three, four, and five, feel plodding when it seems like we're simply driving towards disaster, and not biting our nails at every missed connection along the way. Yes, we know from the play's first speech that these two star-crossed lovers will die at the play's (foregone) conclusion, but somehow Shakespeare makes us hope against hope for their salvation. Harris's choice to have the show open "inside the Nurse's head," as it were, and thus casually bypass the choreographic need for an Act One swordfight, opens up a can of worms as to how one experiences Shakespeare's stories without foreknowledge. The first ten minutes of a Shakespeare production, under the absolute best of circumstances, are tough enough even for the most dexterous theatre-goer, and Harris's opening style-choices feel more likely to alienate than welcome. 

Harris does have some fine flourishes: the rose petals that fall from the ensemble's hands, signifying the blood of the feuding Capulets and Montagues that fills Verona's streets, proved doubly effective when it was also how Romeo recognized the presence of a recent-swashbuckling. You wish there had been more such directorial surrealities, though Harris's collaboration with lighting designer Avery Reagan is commendable in its incisiveness and lack of showboating. His excision of the Mercutio conjuring scene and the Capulet speech about drizzling dew were very appreciated by this reviewer, though the costumes (by John Merritt) could have used a stronger directorial perspective: their semi-timelessness crossed with a general nod to certain early modern styles left my eye “cold.” The vagueness of the costume's setting especially did no aid to Friar Lawrence (Gavin Mueller): a tough emotional assignment on the best of days, here Lawrence felt like a man adrift for reasons exterior to the drama, and placing him in a more literal religious setting would have been nice. As written by Shakespeare, Friar Lawrence seems to be the ultimate well-meaning liberal: willing to claim belief in progressive ideals, but only ever willing to sacrifice the safety of others' for those ideals’ success. You should walk out of R&J ready to beat Lawrence to death with a baseball bat. Here, at GRSF, such ire is remote. 

In its own corner, the moment when the Nurse drew a knife on Capulet (Michael Fitzpatrick) was a real head-scratcher, and should have been relegated to the short-lived enthusiasm of the rehearsal room. Fitzpatrick, a GRSF regular, delivers an affable patriarch (though this one, like most productions, shies away from how truly mean he has to be to Juliet in Act 3, Scene 5). His presence, as well as the ever-sturdy William Sturdivant (as Prince and the Apothecary), begs a question: where have all the (other) regulars gone? Melissa Maxwell, Christopher Gerson, Tarah Flanagan, Benjamin Boucvalt: their absence is as dispiriting as the uncomfortably small audience present with me at the R&J matinee. Let's hope this isn't a signal of waning days for the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Any aesthetic quibbling aside, and this R&J is certainly more ponderous than passionate, they really do deserve all the best.  

The other show in the repertory this year is Artistic Director Doug Scholz-Carlson's rendition of The Comedy of Errors. Set in a bright and funky 1980s milieu, this show is notably allergic to seriousness (with one exception, which will be addressed). For the most part, the production is amiable, even if James Shapiro's quote that The Comedy of Errors is "Shakespeare's most underrated play" continues to be as true on the stage as it is in the academy. The largely fine ensemble do decent work telling the story of a long-coming reunion between two sets of identical twins, Antipholus of Ephesus & Antipholus of Syracuse (William Sturdivant), and Dromio of Ephesus & Dromio of Syracuse (Emily Fury Daly). Occurring basically in real time, the play takes place in the fun yet spooky town of Ephesus, and is mainly a delightful excuse for hijinks to play out on the road to a restorative comedic conclusion. While me and Daly will simply never see eye-to-eye on what constitutes "theatre funny," the audience I saw the play with (notably more packed than earlier that day at R&J) ate up the silliness with goodwill. They particularly responded to the presentation of exorcist Dr. Pinch (Fitzpatrick) as a Christian televangelist (a character whose presence could have been more exploited). 

Scholz-Carlson casts one actor as each pair of twins, which works reasonably well until they have to have a joyful reconciliation in Act 5, and the "theatrical solution" allowing each actor to "talk to themselves" utterly fails to convey the transcendence required of the moment. The production's ending is marred by several such choices. In addition to stick-puppets serving as human stand-ins for the twins, the tearful reunion of Egeon (Fitzpatrick again) and Amelia the Abbess (Stephanie Lambourn) is totally blown, and if blinked through could be missed. More attention should have been paid to the most canonically joyful meeting of husband and wife in all of Shakespeare, this side of Hermione's statue coming to life. 

This brings us to the scene of a great Shakespearean crime. Both right after intermission, and then near the play's ending, Scholz-Carlson adds extra-textual insertions from the collaborative early modern play Sir Thomas More, with lines from a scene believed to have been at least partially written by Shakespeare. In the scene, the sainted More quells the rage of an angry mob attempting to expel "the strangers" from England. This text is a Bardolator's wet dream, as it paints God Shakespeare on the right side of history as a supporter of immigration rights, even way back in the days of yore. However, such a sanctimonious addition reads as the worst kind of "smart" Shakespeareana. The self-satisfaction of the choice wafts over the audience as Shakespeare's most narratively perfect comedy is plastered over with self-righteousness of both the political and dramaturgical kind.

The power of The Comedy of Errors comes from its irreverence: yes, the play deals with spousal abuse, human trafficking, class warfare, domestic violence, the rights of displaced persons, even a freakin' cold war. However, the wild casualness (and even hilarity) with which all of these subjects are treated, ends up making the play more emotional, not less. If you treat the denouement as an excuse for a civics lesson, you rob the drama of its power. The inverse is also true: this comedy has some brutalities. Dromio of Ephesus has a heart-rending monologue about being beaten by his Antipholus since "the hour of [his] nativity," and Adriana and Luciana express acute yearning over the failure of the men in their lives. If you slink away from the real pain expressed in the text, I come to question whether you are actually producing this play in good-faith. Artistic Directors (I’m recalling a quotation from Richard Monette) do have a habit of believing that directing this play is the Shakespearean equivalent of slumming-it. 

The Comedy of Errors has the most pound-for-pound laughs in any of Shakespeare's plays, but also has one of the great tear-jerking moments, when the twin Dromios each find their missing person. If you can't appreciate the play at its toughest, you don't deserve it at its funniest. Shakespeare never served us only dessert, and The Comedy of Errors is no exception. (And I won’t begin to catalogue how the play is also a riotous takedown of Christian mysticism.)  

This same lack of true belief in the play is also found in the cutting of certain "problematic" material, such as Dromio's fat-shaming of the kitchen maid, Luciana's exclamation that men should at least try to pretend they appreciate their female partners ("Alas, poor women, make us yet believe, / Being compact of credit, that you love us"), as well as the "cattier" interactions between Adriana and the Abbess. All these cuts serve to show us a director not entirely at ease with the play's sexual-satirical agenda. Yet just last year, GRSF didn't bat an eye at including (untreated) the more misogynistic elements of Hamlet's interactions with Ophelia and Gertrude, which only proves there is a limit to this company's (supposed) dedication to not "fixing" plays. 

Though truthfully, none of these choices approach the unforgivable insertion of the Sir Thomas More dialogue. I exited the curtain call fuming, and internally raging that it was time for the Shakespeare nerds to get back in their lockers.