The Two "Gentlemen" of Verona - American Players Theatre - 08/16/2026

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus says:

"For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews,
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands." 

But in The Two "Gentlemen" of Verona, Sir Eglamour says:

"Hi, my name's Sir Eglamour!"

Director Aaron Posner cuts the first bit, but has time to add the second. Something is deeply amiss when Shakespeare directors feel they can cut the best poetry from a given play but have all the time in the world to add their own cutesy interpolations.  

Posner's production at American Players Theatre leans into many upsetting Shakespeareana trends. The first being actors inserting modern tags after early modern dialogue. You know the kind. The following is an approximation:

SPEED: Item, She hath no teeth.
LAUNCE: I care not for that neither, because I love crusts. (Looks at audience member) This guy knows what I'm talking about!

Shakespeare directors have found and keep reinventing their own versions of the MCU's "well, that was weird!" Apparently they feel Shakespeare's language has such a stinging effect that it needs a perpetual anti-inflammatory aid of some self-winking shit-talk. 

Let's talk about crowd-work. Comedians know it to be, after prop humor, the cheapest form of laughter. Posner treats us to various instances of mentioned-characters being cast as actual audience members, and thus we get the obligatory "would you stand up please?" from an actor, followed by a sheepish moment of audience participation, followed by a mandatory ovation from a crowd thankful the chosen wasn't them. Is anyone really inspired by this particular brand of "theatre funny?" It feels like most are simply content to laugh in dutiful recognition of a joke -- regardless of quality -- simply having been made at all. 

And who started this trend? The trend where every Shakespeare comedy needs a handful of live musicians to "carry" us through the action, giving us redundant context for the play we are already watching. Maybe they're singing folk songs, maybe original lyrics, and maybe they're even snidely commenting on the action! Is modern attention so wandering as to need a perpetual bouncing ball of something, anything to listen to other than Shakespeare's language? The shtick of "oh look, the whole ensemble is going to come out and mug at the audience and sing a jaunty tune of introduction" is as stale as this production's vaguely riverboat Americana setting. Shakespeare directors love their Mark Twain-fused Appalachia: just think of all the bluegrass possibilities! At Judgment Day, I plan on asking the Lord how many different tracks from the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? made it onto Spotify inspiration playlists digitally shared amongst Shakespearean theatrical production teams. Surely the billions would flummox Carl Sagan. 

The early comedy tells the story of Valentine (Colin Covert) and Proteus (Jonathan Gardner) as they make their way from Verona to Milan, encountering young love and growing pains. Valentine falls in love with Silvia (Ama J. Kuwonu), and Proteus eventually forsakes his initial love, Julia (Maggie Cramer), to also pursue Silvia, and attempt to woo her behind his best friend's back. The play has an adolescent temper, but it's not juvenilia. The verse is regular and heartfelt and the story is the easiest line-for-line understanding experience in Shakespeare. In what may be his first play, Shakespeare gives us a round, unvarnished tale of how the world contorts to accommodate masculine romantic misbehavior. 

Even at the beginning of his playwriting career, Shakespeare was already pushing theatrical boundaries by giving us what superficially appears to be a rose-tinted romantic comedy, yet at the narrative’s conclusion we realize we’ve been plunged into a dark-night-of-the soul, and find ourselves questioning the very possibility of romantic comedy, as it irresponsibly sentimentalizes notions of adolescent indiscretion. We see this particularly in the thwarted assault of Silvia by Proteus, an action immediately forgiven by Valentine. Rather than view the troubling ending as a tonal error, it seems far more fruitful to have faith that Shakespeare knew what he was doing, which gives the drama a far more experimental edge than most scholars would believe. The ending causes us to ponder whether or not it’s acceptable to view forgiveness as an ultimate virtue, when so often it is bestowed by those who have no right to present it. 

But don't worry, Posner doesn't even go there. Rather than include the action as written, wherein Proteus proclaims his intention to rape Silvia, and then Valentine forcibly stops him, causing Proteus to relent and beg for forgiveness, after which Valentine not only forgives him but appears to offer Silvia to Proteus as an armistice, Posner just cuts that business. You can hear the conversation: "too tough...too uncomfortable...doesn't work." For all of Posner's adaptory showboating of inserting quotation marks over the word "gentlemen" (cuz see, they're like NOT actually gentlemen), he doesn't even end up using the weaponry the play gives you to deconstruct itself. After spending two hours in a rom-com, Shakespeare pulls an about-face and we see how easily a rom-com turns to horror. The ending ultimately pulls the rug out from under us by presenting the critical perspective we would not have known we were viewing had we not been so completely immersed in its opposite. But Posner just cuts the uncomfy stuff, has a girl-boss Julia smack Proteus around a bit for his duplicity, and calls it a day with a wink and a song. "It'll all be okay, Proteus just needed a firm talking-to." 

While the faults here are directorial, the cast is genial and well-behaved. Gardner brings lovely earnestness to Proteus' language when he's given the chance, and it's fun hearing an audience react in real-time to his betrayals and caddishness. James Ridge as Launce and David Daniel as Speed have fun moments, though the southern dialects Posner foists upon them are a real drag. The band of outlaws who make the banished Valentine their quasi woodland pirate king are likely the most underrated comedic subplot in Shakespeare: no matter the production, it's hard not to smile at these Penzancian sweethearts posing as vagabonds. Same with the confrontation between Valentine and the Duke (Brian Mani) that causes Valentine to reveal his plot to rescue Silvia: the beats that cause the scheming Duke to worm the info out of Valentine are so ridiculous as to always be charming. 

I just wished the director liked the play. Shakespeare needs your love and not your condescension. I don't need directors telling me in their program note this play isn't one of Shakespeare's best. Your job is to tell me what this play can do that none other can. The production seems to have been shot out of a computorial system at Shakespeare Solutions TM. Everything annoying about current American approaches to the bard is on display: the music, the shtick, the self-congratulation. Every critical era has its Shakespearean gripes, and Posner embraces all of them. Also, pick up the pace, we could drive a train through these pauses and chop at least 15 minutes off the thing. Adding forgettable songs with the creator of Urinetown (Greg Kotis) but then not including Shakespeare's original "Who is Silvia" just makes you come across as smug. 

We underestimate Shakespeare at our peril. Even his worst play is smarter than you. 

As You Like It - American Players Theatre - 08/13/2026

Loving Shakespeare's language to death is not necessarily a crime. As theatrical sins go, lackluster scene-changes and overlong curtain calls are certainly worse. So saying Laura Rook has in any way "failed" as the director of American Players Theatre's production of As You Like It would be inaccurate, as her biggest pitfall is simply leaving too much room for love. 

APT actors who take to directing "up the hill" often produce pace-troubled productions. James DeVita's Hamlet (2022) and David Daniel's A Midsummer Night's Dream (2025) showed deep care and appreciation for Shakespeare's wordsmithery, but did so at the expense of narrative engines. Rook is in the same position, and with a less forgiving text, since the plot of As You Like It is already so aimless. The show needs a firm hand to make the action not feel meandering and tension-less, particularly in acts 3 through 5. Seeing a profoundly skilled ensemble overly relish the riches of this play amidst the most gorgeous natural amphitheater in the U.S. is unlikely to rankle. APT has a history of hiring directors who will let their actors soar rather than approach the text with an auteurist's conception. You just feel the whole evening could sing more if Rook put her foot on the gas at some later dress rehearsal and demanded the ensemble pick up their feet. 

In contrast to most recent productions of Shakespeare's most amiable hang, Rook takes the historical setting seriously. This As You Like It begins in a French court much like that of Louis XIII, replete with nuns and bishops and musketeers (costumes by Rachel Anne Healy). Many renditions lean into the play's meta-elements (what with all the world being a stage, and so forth), but this is an As You Like It firmly rooted in social specificity. As its anchor is Samantha Newcomb as Rosalind, who brings sparkling ease and joy to Shakespeare's most scintillating neurotic. Rosalind's wit and verve tends to be the self-justifying reason for her being, rather than discernible personality traits. This gets into a thorny, highly gendered discussion of how Shakespeare created his male vs. female characters, but the women's individualities tend to be harder to pinpoint than the men's. If Macbeth is imaginative, and Lear is passionate, what is Rosalind? "Smart?" In Shakespeare, male characters tend to be defined by tangible qualities, and women by more ethereal descriptors. Hamlet will get described as a "man of genius," whereas Juliet will be "written in light." This may be more a failure of masculine critical discourse than playwriterly creation, but you experience Newcomb's Rosalind more as a linguistic "force" than as a person who is like anybody you know. Though more than any Rosalind I've seen, Newcomb manages to make sense of her decision to dress as a man by making it a reaction to the tyrannical decree of Duke Frederick (Gavin Lawrence): when she speaks of having "a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances," you feel she's taking instruction from her despotic uncle. 

Lots of fine acting fills out the cast. Sola Thompson is a terrific foil to Newcomb as Celia. James Ridge makes an endearing and huggable Adam. Rasell Holt is effectively mewling and wimpy as Oliver in his villainous era. One effect of repertory casting is you get great actors in parts they are wildly overqualified for, and so we have the gifts of Triney Sandoval as Le Beau, and Sam Luis Massaro as Charles the Wrestler. Massaro, to his credit, actually makes Charles' thumpy exposition feel like new info is being delivered. And Sandoval unveiling a blood-stained wrestling pad was an elegant scenic touch (set design by Lawrence E. Moten III and Daniel Allen). 

Derrick Moore as Orlando stumbles in his characterization. Clearly a strong performer, Moore and Rook have not made sense of a number of important beats in the Orlando trajectory. His initial falling in love with Rosalind at the wrestling match is muddy, his care for Adam's near-starvation is too jokey, which then leads to his desperation in trying to extract food from Duke Senior's merry band not being sufficiently severe. Rook also does Moore no favors by having Orlando's joyous outcry about adorning the forest of Arden with love poems to his Rosalind come immediately after he's experienced the death of Adam, his faithful servant. Adam's death is an extratextual insertion you sometimes have to be reminded is not actually in Shakespeare's play, so often is it added by directors. As presented here, we needed an additional moment of Orlando's grief before we could comfortably transition to his literary enthusiasm, and thus we are led into intermission on an unintentionally sour note. 

Another moment that ends up depleting the tension reservoir is Rook's decision to have Orlando realize that Ganymede is the disguised Rosalind around the time of their fake marriage by Celia in Act 4, Scene 1. While Rook has the theorizing of James Shapiro on her side (he writes about this choice in his book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare), having Orlando recognize Rosalind so early ends up making their later forest dealings feel all the more like a foregone conclusion. If Orlando has already determined the disguised young man is his love, then really what are we doing here for so long? Director Declan Donnellan, in his 1991 production with Cheek By Jowl, had Rosalind be upset that Orlando didn't recognize her initially under her masculine disguise, and thus take up the "cure for love" as a means to educate Orlando on the ways of love before a life-long commitment. Some of that urgency would have been useful here. Even the most loving linguistic clarity can turn laborious when it isn't supported by narrative tension. 

That being said, Rook adds many lovely insertions, particularly in establishing the forest community of Duke Senior (David Alan Anderson). While Anderson's Senior is more befuddled than inspiring, the largeness of his chosen family in banishment is sweetly intergenerational. Not only are there the standard male compatriots, but Rook makes a point of adding a number of women (one pregnant) and kids and babies to the Arden-based commune. Seeing Audrey (Hannah Ruwe) and Phoebe (Emma Schuld) also get to be part of the golden age forest tribe from the get-go makes for a richer texture to Arden's social fabric.  

Personally, I never need to see or hear the scenes about Jaques (David Daniel) castigating Senior's tribe for deer-killing ever again. I've never experienced those moments as anything other than kill-joys. Daniel is a master versifier, and one point where Rook's overly-precious approach to language pays off is in the infamous "all the world's a stage" speech. There, Daniel calmly and clearly takes the audience by the hand and leads us from cradle to grave, with every auditory jewel mined and every poetic rock turned. You wouldn't say Daniel's overall through-line as Jaques is clear, but I don't know that it was to Shakespeare. The placement of such a grand, metaphysical pronouncement in this particular comedy remains a head-scratcher, but hearing the speech spoken by Daniel under the stars of Sauk County is a pleasure needing no justification.

I recognize my reviews often become catalogues of minor grievances, but Joe Meyer as Dennis could stand less "look at me in my walk-on role" mugging. Also, while having Hymen (Leslie Brott) be accompanied by a large-scale, makeshift puppet was charming, the solution was too similar to that of director Kimberley Sykes' 2019 RSC production. I wish the song of the final wedding festivities hadn't been so awkwardly quiet. I also wish directors were less squeamish around Rosalind's epilogue-based invocation of "the men" and "the women" (Rook here softens the language to be more broad). While the harsh binary could feel discriminatory under certain circumstances, I do believe that Rosalind is challenging us: "if you can get through a story like this, where expectations of gender in both society and personal lives have been so thoroughly deconstructed, and still think categories like "the men" and "the women" have any stable meaning, well than God help you, because that ignorance is on you, not me."  

Most will likely leave Rook's production sated, having been served a dish of great poetic diction and pleasant woodland vibes. I know I left humming "It Was A Lover And His Lass" as I trekked down the APT hill. The conclusion of As You Like It seems to demand a lack of self-seriousness in the vein of an ending to a Moliere comedy. The quadruple wedding plus the appearance of a third De Boys brother plus the revelation of Frederick's spiritual conversion plus the literal Deus ex machina of Hymen the god of marriage all consort to make an ending that is gleefully soap operatic in the best of ways. 

If Rook doesn't exactly "solve" every challenge of As You Like It, the heart and care she brings (mostly) make up for it. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Stratford Festival - 08/08/2026

Upon repeat viewings of a play, interpretive novelties tend to shine. Thus, with Graham Abbey's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Stratford Festival, it's easy to lead with the fact that the prologue shows Titania's votaress friend giving birth to the changeling child. Through an elegant movement sequence "suggesting" childbirth, movement director Stephanie Graham shows the fairies aiding the woman in her delivery before premature mortality takes hold and the woman dies after the baby is born. We then through "theatre magic" see a red swaddling cloth turn into a young girl (Vivienne Abbey) who will become the subject of contention between the fairy monarchs Titania (Sara Topham) and Oberon (André Sills). Abbey as director ends up taking the reunification of Titania and Oberon as seriously as you could hope (he tries to believe they actually are "new in amity"), so focusing the beginning on the origins of their marital strife feels germane. The sequence also foregrounds the show as lush and lively with some spirited Celtic folk tunes played by Titania's henchwomen.  

This Dream is set in the regal Victorian era. Antoni Cimolino's production of The Tempest, also playing now, is set during the early 1800s. Stratford directors seem to have inherited former leader Robin Phillips' obsession for Shakespeare in the 19th century. Whatever the cause, the world of the play, with sets by Lorenzo Savoini and costumes by Joshua Quinlan, is pleasantly sumptuous while not reinventing any Midsummer color pallette. Forest browns and greens as branch and foliage is the name of the game.

Another novelty is the terrific performance of Vivien Endicott-Douglas, the best Hermia I've ever seen. She brings a full-throated poetic vivaciousness to the thwarted young lover. Her sexily chaste banter with Lysander (Jordin Hall, schticky but very endearing) in Act 1, Scene 1 shows as delightful a pairing of Midsummer lovers as you could hope to find. Jessica B. Hill also brings great sporting fun to Helena, though you wish she had broken up the verse less in the name of colloquial jokiness. Her embracement of the proto-kink relationship between her and Demetrius (Thomas Duplessie) is refreshing in its candor. 

Abbey's decision to make the "rude mechanicals" circus performers is confounding, as you'd suspect such professional performers would actually be good at performing. But the costume of Bottom (Michael Spencer-Davis) being quite stylish was a fun nod to both his vanity and his weaving profession. Their ultimate "Pyramus and Thisbe" is funny in a very predictable "theatre-y" way, but most audience members haven't seen the show 40,000 different times, and thus can be forgiven for finding it enjoyable. The piano stylings of Michael Man as a balladeer Starveling/Moonshine was a funsy addition. 

The production is a Stratford collaboration with Groundling Theatre, an immersive tech-based theatre founded by Abbey. As such, the lunar and astrological projections (by Normal Studio) play a sizable role on the Tom Patterson stage. A suspended moon is the central projection canvas, and the tech elements are pleasantly integrated for purposes of woodland mysticism.  

All of Graham's movement direction, including the early courtly dancing and the later bergamasque, not to mention the deeply-felt blessing of the newly-married couples, adds a great texture. If the higher-tech projection system took over a bit too much during the last speech of Puck (Mike Nadajewski), who can blame this drama nerd for still having a tear in his eye? That epilogue will always be the ultimate chicken soup for the Shakespeare soul. 

Overall, the production is a great hang with its heart in the right place, that leaves you pleasantly if not overwhelmingly enchanted. The superstition that Shakespeare wrote wicked magic into the text of Macbeth, and thus its performance is often cursed with unluckiness, has its inverse in A Midsummer Night's Dream. You feel like Shakespeare created incantatory benevolent poetry for the benefit of favorable emotional and spiritual transformation. Somehow the text always blesses the rendition at hand.

Even if no novelties were present, how could you ever tire of such good luck? 

Othello - Stratford Festival - 08/07/2026

A great Othello is one of art's finest endurance tests. In that vein, director Haysam Kadri's Stratford rendition is a stair-master. By way of being sleek, clear, and generally stylish, Kadri creates a taut and very upsetting tragedy. The story of a Venetian general brought low by the wicked machinations of a sociopath, Othello remains the most stressful drama in the Shakespeare canon. The interior monologue of an Othello audience member often reads as such: "wow, that...that was a stressful scene. [Another scene happens.] Wow, that was....that was another stressful scene..." and so on until its grisly conclusion. 

Despite the production's renaissance setting, Evan Buliung's Iago has a distinctly contemporary ick. Buliung brings the necessary self-aware diabolism and blue-collar charm that make Iago so disturbing. The casting of Jordin Hall, a Black performer, as Cassio, also gives Iago's motivation the air of a modern conservative railing against affirmative action. One can imagine this Iago venting his frustration at being passed over for the promotion that went to Cassio while calling in on alt-right talk radio. Props to Buliung and Kadri for creating an Iago whom we don't love to hate: the days of audiences gleefully chuckling at the antics of an evil white man destroying the life of a Black man as though the play were a perverse farce feel mostly over. 

André Sills' Othello is a slow-burn. He starts the play grounded to a (near) fault, with little of the sainted nobility often seen in the role's interpreters. However, his dedication to the terrestrial plain pays off by the play's end, when his commitment to psychological reality makes the murder of his wife Desdemona (Krystin Pellerin) all the more horrifying. Sills' résumé makes a strong case for him as the best classical stage actor of his generation: his intensely sympathetic Coriolanus, his wizened Lavatch, his clarion Edgar, his trickster Don Pedro, and his hilarious Orsino, all add up to an actor who can do basically anything. His emphasis on Othello's rugged military demeanor over any interior sanctity is clearly a deliberate choice, and one that ends up gruesomely effective as we watch this man we have come to know and trust be pushed into homicidal madness.  

The most formidable of the supporting cast is Jessica B. Hill as Emilia, Iago's wife. Festival regulars must surely have grasped the exceptional nature of Hill's finely-wrought characterizations, and so the quality of her repressed though ultimately hell-raising Emilia comes as no surprise. In addition, the casting of Chick Reid as a gender-swapped Brabantia (here, Desdemona's mother) usefully highlights liberal complicity in racist systems, especially by white women. 

Kadri's production aims for Swiss-watch-status, which it nearly achieves. Brian Dudkiewicz's set design brings a fractured Gothicism to the Tom Patterson stage, with its red, ruined, malleable architecture. Anita Nittoly's fight direction moves trippingly in the actors' bodies. Siobhán Sleath's lights usefully isolate Iago in his direct-address, and add an enjoyable sickly greenish hue to necessary moments (the "green-eyed monster" of jealousy, and all). Kadri's only stumble is the unintentionally comic use of slo-mo action during the scene when Iago maliciously gets Cassio drunk, but such a choice can reasonably be explained away as a "style" choice ("it'll help us understand time is passing," you can imagine the director saying in the rehearsal room). 

Iago appearing after intermission with the lieutenant's sash previously worn by Cassio was an excellent touch. And the audience getting to see Othello wipe away Desdemona's piteous tears with the infamous handkerchief during the story of his life was a brilliant illustration. When relating how he courted Desdemona through his life's travelogue, he says "I...often did beguile her of her tears, / When I did speak of some distressful stroke / That my youth suffered." Here, Kadri stages a meta-insert where we see some of those interactions between Desdemona and Othello during the speech, and getting to see the handkerchief during the incipient courtship is a brilliant inclusion.  

Despite an audience that seemed to basically know their Othello by rote, we were all suspended in horror during the last scene. Such a reaction is a testament to both Kadri's direction and Shakespeare's perennial ability to disturb us even when we know the ending. Truly, the Othello soundscape is enough for an event. The sounds and cadence and verse patterns justify any ticket-goer's purchase. This is sacrilegious to most theatrical practitioners' post-Method doctrine, which insists all words upon the stage must be excavated from the performers' inner recesses, and poetic diction should be the actor's last concern. All items cosmetic must necessarily follow foundational motivations, we claim. But really, when you're in the presence of Othello and its languages, that is a richness and power with which most of life cannot compete. The Stratford production makes the play gripping and disturbing in equal measure, and energizes you even as it puts you through the tragic wringer.  

Near the play's end, when Othello learns everything Iago has told him about Desdemona's infidelity with Cassio has been a lie, he assess his tormenter with the following words: 

"I look down towards his feet, but that's a fable." 

He means he is looking for the cloven-hooves that should prove Iago to be a devil. But the "fable" Othello knows to be false is that malicious people can be denoted by physical characteristics. The ensnarement Iago commits proves more terrifying by stemming from a secular being. Milton's Satan acted against God and his Angels "from sense of injured merit," and you feel like Iago was the basis for Satan, not the other way around.

Kadri's Othello, minus some psychoanalytic visual flourishes, keeps the status of Othello as Shakespeare's most domestic tragedy. The result is engrossing and unshowy and devastating. 

The Tempest - Stratford Festival - 08/06/2026

You would never have known Ben Carlson was an understudy. The rugged surety with which he brought psychic toll and paternal care to Prospero was unimpeachable. While the banished magus is often a role reserved for the victory lap of a theatrical grand old gent, seeing Prospero be closer to the textually appropriate 50 years of age was refreshing. We often have a bit of "Aunt May syndrome" when it comes to the role, and forget he's not actually supposed to be Miranda's grandparent. By which I mean, Carlson was more Marisa Tomei than Rosemary Harris. 

But had this been a standard performance in the run, Prospero would have been played by another Festival mainstay, Geraint Wyn Davies. Davies being indisposed this day, that also bumped John Kirkpatrick up to Stephano (where Carlson is normally). Seeing Kirkpatrick, the Festival's most reliable Duke/First Messenger, in a more substantive role, was delightful. Neither understudies missed a beat, and had there been no program insert, not a single audience member would have known anything was irregular. 

Twelve years prior to the one-day action of The Tempest, Prospero and his daughter Miranda have been banished from his Milanese dukedom, and put to sea to die. They ended up ashore on a magical, nearly deserted isle, populated by the spirit Ariel, and the monster Caliban. The play takes place on the day Prospero's enemies sail near the island, and he casts them ashore after using his magical powers to raise the titular storm, and seek a path to retribution, which eventually turns into forgiveness. 

The production on the Festival Stage in Stratford, ON, places the action in the early 1800s, a "modernization" so light it counts as period. As such, the Italian regents are vaguely Napoleonic, though the elemental Ariel and Caliban retain their respective ethereal and aquatic features. The production is Antoni Cimolino's last Shakespeare outing as Artistic Director, and he commendably refrains from the morphine-drip of reading Prospero as a Shakespeare stand-in. His production of The Tempest is charming, sturdy and reasonably moving, if not fully convincing (more on that later). 

The ensemble is uniformly reliable. The most original characterization comes from Marissa Orjalo as Ariel, who brings a sense of hobgoblin juvenilia to the role of Prospero's servant. Orjalo leans into the zoomy toddler energy of Ariel, effectively highlighting the role as Prospero's adopted child. If Orjalo veers a bit too far towards the sentimental with "do you love me, master? No?" how could she be blamed, aren't such moments why we're here at all?

Fiona Reid's gender-swapped Gonzala brings lovely feeling to her vision of a new "commonwealth" where the traitorous actions of her peers could never take place. Gordon S. Miller lends appropriate moustache-twirling energy to Prospero's usurping brother, Antonio, though when you've already conquered Iago, you seem overqualified for all other heavies. 

Carlson softens some of Prospero's harsher language to Ariel, and finds reasonable affection for Miranda (Ashley Dingwell) without veering too far into the earnestness of a contemporary girl-dad. I'd say his moral contrition started too early, and that it should have been more the result of Ariel's admonishment vis-a-vis "were I human," but such quibbles make me feel that, as a Shakespeare nerd, I should get back in my locker.  

As for the "convincing" claim: this Tempest leaves you satisfied if never energized. Cimolino takes the play's dramaturgy at face-value and doesn't attempt to hew it into a nail-biter or psychodrama. Cimolino makes the masque that Prospero presents to celebrate the engagement of Miranda and Ferdinand (Dakota Jamal Wellman) an underwater extravaganza, replete not only with mythical goddesses, but also attendant oversized jellyfish. Absolutely nothing is wrong with such treatment of Shakespeare's most vexing intra-theatrical interlude. The only ways Cimolino's Tempest doesn't succeed are in ways audiences are unaccustomed to seeing productions accomplish. When you have a capable and dynamic cast across the board, it helps cover up for the fact that, as written, Prospero feels like an absent protagonist between acts 1 and 4. When your production is attractively designed (set and costumes by Julie Fox), an audience doesn't mind that the plots with the nobles and the drunken clowns can feel like dramatic loitering. Shakespeare seemed more interested in dramatic symmetry than dramatic tension in his last solo-authored play. 

At least as preserved on TV format, John Hirsch's 1982 Stratford production is the closest we've come to the play onstage actually feeling like a corrective revenge tragedy with a pressure-cooker narrative. Despite the apparent urgency of one day's action that will make or break this unjustly banished duke and his innocent child, The Tempest just never feels like a nail-biter. Hamlet says "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough hew them how we will." The action of The Tempest often feels like the divinity without any of the rough-hewing. Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Book smartly dispensed with pretending to care about the plot, decided The Tempest was what happened when renaissance oil painting and baroque pageantry and mellifluous poetry collided, and was wildly the better for it. 

No one will leave Cimolino's production thinking he did wrong by Shakespeare, but justifying The Tempest as drama instead of emotional spectacle remains an open question.

Much Ado About Nothing - Chicago Shakespeare Theater - 12/10/2025

Lately, I find myself interested in what we cry about when we cry about Shakespeare. Focusing on weeping is not entirely fair in the case of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Much Ado About Nothing. The show, as directed by Selina Cadell, is fun and sunny and packed with good, warm-hearted vibes. But these are teardrops of another sort. Duke Senior in As You Like It invokes "tears that sacred pity hath engendered," and that assignment is the high-water mark for Much Ado. 

The dual love stories of Beatrice and Benedick and Hero and Claudio, despite their sturdy placement in a realistic township, present us with a fantasy world. The terrestrial fantasy that Shakespeare gives us in Much Ado shows us that whatever cynicism we've thrown at life, and whatever grievous errors of judgment we've committed, at the end of our saga there will still be a life-partner uniquely commensurate to our specific brand of idiosyncrasy. All our trials will find healing in redemptive meaning. Even if they've engaged in a lengthy "merry war," we love to imagine that Beatrice (Deborah Hay) and Benedick (Mark Bedard) can still find connection across a gulf of irascibility. We also hope against hope that when Hero (Mi Kang) forgives Claudio (Samuel B. Jackson) for his misinformed slander campaign against her, there could actually be a positive relationship on the other end of a real rough start. Also in this fantasy world is a supportive community of loving friends who know you better than you know yourself and will actively take time out of their day to make sure you end up with the right match. Add in that Shakespeare's Messina seems to be largely a resort/leisure town without a ton of sectional conflict (its police force is literally a citizens organization) and you basically pass the barrier from fantasy to delusion. And yet somehow this play has the reputation of being Shakespeare's most grounded comedy? 

Yet in production, despite the show's effervescence, the play's moments of tearful pathos tend to be what stand out, or feel equally missing. Here, Cadell and cast hit their marks lovingly. Hay as Beatrice is a superb vessel of poetic communication, and she makes her arias about stars dancing and eating hearts moving enough to pierce right through anyone's turtle-shell (poetry has a way of poking us where we have no protective armor). Bedard is beguiling in a rakish way that I wouldn't say his previous CST appearances have hinted towards. Along with Scenic & Costume Designer Tom Piper, Cadell has concocted a warm, Tuscany-like Messina that feels like an enviable vacation spot. Her embracement of the beach-read elements of the play, and her sensitivity to the nuances of Shakespeare's verse (and prose), make her an ideal director for this text. After this and her recent Hamlet with Eddie Izzard, hopefully she'll become a CST mainstay, as this and Tamara Harvey's Pericles have been the Shakespearean highlights of Edward Hall's recently-assumed tenure as Artistic Director. 

While Cadell's first half is a perfectly calibrated lyric stanza, it would be disingenuous to say the second half is as strong. The emergence of Dogberry (Sean Fortunato) and team adds a layer of humor too artificial to stand comfortably next to the easy, unforced laughs of the first half. Cadel's more "meta" insertions don't sit easy, like a repeated transitional birdsong, a "Hero out of time" moment on a balcony, and the self-congratulatory "make sure you're in the right costume" bits foisted upon Jaylon Muchison (a delightful performer, the bits are not his fault). Though whatever quibbles on the way to the comedic conclusion, the world of the play is just so fun to be in that such immersion is likely to be one's ultimate impression. The vibes are just that good. 

Debo Balogun stands out as an absolutely terrific Don Pedro. We get to see him be the good angel schemer in contrast to his brother Don John's bad angel schemer (Erik Hellman as John is a highly amusing Snidely Whiplash). CST stalwart Kevin Gudhal also shines brighter than usual as a memorably feeling Leonato; this might be his most moving patriarch. Bedard's bit of hiding his newly-shaven face with the excuse "I have the toothache" was a gem of textual revelation. And Hay's desperate legalistic pleading after she's announced she's in love with Benedick but still has to exclaim "I CONFESS NOTHING" was hilarious. 

You wouldn't claim this production "fixes" the fact that Claudio and Hero are not equals in delight to Beatrice and Benedick. But Cadell shows the play can stand on its own, without the need for any overt moralistic hand-wringing. This is definitely not Chris Abraham's 2023 production at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, where playwright Erin Shields was employed to give the denouement extra dialogue to damn well make sure the audience could stomach Hero and Claudio by contemporary standards. Not to be glib, but Cadell does not try out-woke Shakespeare on this one.

A beautiful choice is made when Balthasar (Muchison) is asked by Pedro and friends to sing the song "Sigh no more, ladies." As Balthasar intones the ballad, Pedro and Leonato and Claudio are clearly having a blissed-out time, and the song is so enchanting it causes the hiding Benedick to almost reveal himself and join in the chorus. Thus, Cadell shows that this song is a part of the love-trap Pedro and bros are laying for Benedick, as a cunning way to lower his defenses through music. 

If this review can stand one more theory, it's this: all emotionally moving Shakespeare is moving in the same way, though not necessarily equal to each other. While there may be cosmetic variations from actor to actor, there's really only one right way to be moved when Lear commands "Howl, howl, howl." Different performers will have different "takes" but there's only one correct reaction to a Juliet's well-delivered "thy lips are warm." And in CST's production, Hay in particular nails the necessary way in which Beatrice asks of us the tears that sacred pity hath engendered. The radiant utterance of "I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest" creates its own self-sustaining meaning that entirely justifies the theatre-going experience. 

Let's hope CST sticks with Cadell and Harvey as directorial gunslingers, because if so, this could be a delightful new era on Navy Pier. 

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.