Is it possible to overdose on Shakespeare? Imagine that was the top text posed by the following image:
Ok jokes are over. More on this later.
Seana McKenna's production of Twelfth Night on the Festival Stage in Stratford, ON is a highly amiable affair. Noted Canadian actor (and first-time Festival director), McKenna lightly sets the action in 1967, though the placement is a far-cry from that one As You Like It you're thinking of right now. If all actors who've played Hamlet can be classified either as "to be" Hamlets or "not to be" Hamlets, all Twelfth Night productions can justifiably be dubbed either "basically happy" or "basically bittersweet," and this one is certainly the former. The cap is nodded in the direction of Sir Toby's rejection of Sir Andrew (Scott Wentworth and Rylan Wilkie, respectively), and the highly convincing Laura Condlln renders Malvolio's speech of rage upon his release from imprisonment absolutely as striking as it needs to be. However, this is no Twelfth Night where you feel like Malvolio is going to seek his revenge "on the whole pack" of the assembled via a 3-D printer and an AR-15. This is staunchly a "basically happy" Twelfth Night, and the alternative is starting to feel like a relic of yesteryear (maybe people just seem to be over the idea of an incel Malvolio).
In McKenna's production, the justifiable stars are the central coupling of Viola (Jessica B. Hill) and Orsino (Andre Sills). As the lovelorn woman disguised as a boy in love with the Duke she serves, Hill is customarily excellent. While the production sometimes encourages her into cheaper laughs than she need truly ask for, Hill has emerged as one of the outstanding current talents of the Stratford Festival. Especially after her Lady Capulet and her Helena in All's Well That Ends Well two seasons ago, it comes as no surprise that her Viola shines via a unique portal of rhetorical clarity and emotional generosity. She is one of those performers who get dubbed things like "compulsively watchable," and with her onstage, you know Shakespeare will be done total justice as Hill takes accountability for her part of the story.
Also, you gotta hand it to a guy who can do both Coriolanus AND Duke Orsino. Andre Sills' physically imposing presence onstage should not belie the fact that the man can suggest bizarre neurotic psychosis at the distance of a country mile. His Orsino is both a commanding potentate and a huge weirdo and asking for more would be unreasonable.
Vanessa Sears as Olivia fares as well as she did as Juliet, though here with a stronger production backing her up: her joy at learning the newly-discovered Viola is going to be her sister is infectious. And seeing Emilio Vieira as Antonio, a vessel of earnest caring, not rejected but included in the play's ending festivities, is a welcome turn from a typical Twelfth Night shibboleth (Vieira is also a notably feeling Tybalt this year).
Condlln's Malvolio treads the journey of the pseudo-puritan in a manner that's totally satisfying: watching her "box-tree" scene where she's spied on as she reads the letter Maria (Sarah Dodd) has forged to appear like Olivia's handwriting, you are struck with the impression that Shakespeare's innate understanding of a fun character journey was preternaturally intuitive. Ok ok I know I know yes "Shakespeare was really great" but somehow I do feel he's still kinda underrated as a dramatist. Michael Spencer-Davis here serves a useful function as Fabian, particularly when articulating that the course of revenge against Malvolio was taken out of injury, not inherent cruelty (which helps to lighten the play's finale).
Which brings me back to the overdose. Nary through a fault of the Festival, or of the Bard himself, I largely find myself really Twelfth Nighted out. Between the two fundamental poles of happiness and bittersweetness, I feel like I am several decades removed from a surprise in Twelfth Night viewing. With surfeiting the appetite hath sickened and so died. That being said, even if the play doesn't mean as much to me as it did when I was fifteen and felt the poetry was a force for cellular manipulation and basically wanted to consume the comedy intravenously (I probably identified with Malvolio a little too much tbh), McKenna's production leaves you warmed and beguiled. Maybe the era of hyper-dark Shakespearean comedy is over, or maybe it was just self-imposed all along.
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