The Show That Never Ends | Periscope Depth

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Sep

never think of never, let this spell last forever

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Trout Stanley: A weird but captivating little play, which blossoms under some excellent performances from Exquisite Corps Theatre.

I was initially skeptical of the play, as I would be of anything whose synopsis begins, “The morning after an exotic dancer and local Scrabble champion goes missing …” But I suspended my disbelief long enough to head to the Factory Theatre on Tremont St. The set alone convinced me to stick around: the most complete transformation I’ve ever seen, turning the brick-lined black box into a kitschy apartment, full of the accumulated knicknacks of ten years of solitude, cluttered but not filthy. The tech crew also did some ingenious things with lighting, going from morning to evening to twilight without losing visibility on the proceedings. (Some of the lighting changes seemed a little arbitrary, and there were a few sound flubs, but this happens in any production)

trout_stanley

The play itself is better than it sounds, at least in the hands of a skilled cast. It’s Beckett by way of SCTV: a tale of two characters, plausible in the abstract but cranked up to extremes, who live in an eccentric spinsterhood in the Canadian suburbs. There’s Grace Ducharme, the feathered and flirty blonde who runs the local garbage dump, and there’s her twin sister Sugar, wearing their dead mother’s tracksuit – the Laura Wingfield of the family. When a grubby but naive wanderer stumbles into their home, it upsets the quarantine bubble they’ve made of their lives these past ten years.

Trout Stanley hinges so much on the characters believing the world they live in – as odd a world as it is – that it wouldn’t work without truly compelling performances. Kathryn Lynch (Grace) has excellent comic timing, lighting up every scene she’s in with the verve of a sketch show veteran. Sean George (Trout) has an animal intensity that makes him both weird and fascinating at the same time. When he says, “I never lie,” he says it with a desperate conviction that makes you believe him. But Becky Webber (Sugar) is the standout, primarily because she does so much with scenes where she’s the only one on stage. When she has nothing to play off of but her reflection in the mirror, a phone call with a man in town or a well-loved 12″ vinyl LP, she sinks into a trance of such complete self-obliviousness that it’s almost intrusive to watch her.

It’s an odd play, to be sure, but the production will make you laugh and keep you hooked. Worth a visit.

Aug

et in arcadia ego

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Arcadia: Tom Stoppard is a favorite among directors. Partly because his plays are really good and very popular, of course, but also because they’re always deep and intricate. Arcadia is Stoppard at his most intellectual: a play about mathematical discoveries, debates over scholarship, the death of Enlightenment and the birth of Romanticism. It takes place in an English manor home over a span of two hundred years, entwining the Coverleys of 1809 (plus their guests and tutors) with the Coverleys of 2011 (plus the scholars studying them).

Bad Habit Productions’ Arcadia is well cast in every role (as BHP shows tend to be), but a few actors in particular deserve notice. David Lutheran, as doomed poet Ezra Chater, steals every scene he’s in with just a few perplexed facial expressions and twitches of an outrageous mustache. Sarah Bedard pulls off the role of Hannah Jarvis, itinerant Byron scholar, with deft balance, portraying a woman who is confident and independent without falling into the cliches of being bitchy, frigid or flighty. And Alycia Sacco is captivating as Thomasina Coverley, vanishing entirely into the role with a mastery of precocious teenage mannerism and cadence. She’s a well-bred girl who thinks a lot of herself, yet is still cleverer than she knows. Your heart breaks for her innocence.

BHP staged Arcadia in the round in the Wimberly Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts. It helps thrust the audience into the drawing-room atmosphere of the play, which lends certain scenes a needed intimacy. But it also results in some difficult staging. In the first act I found myself almost unable to see the action due to the people sitting in front of me. That’s something of a novelty at six foot five; I offer retroactive and preemptive apologies to anyone who’s suffered so at my hands. There’s also a piano offstage, which plays an incidental role in certain scenes, that was nevertheless distracting.

At only five years old, BHP has already put together some very true productions of inventive plays. Arcadia is another great show in their repertoire. Definitely worth seeing.

Jul

hideous progeny

Posted by Perich at 6:43 am

Hideous Progeny: the weekend that produced Frankenstein has so much drama in its premise, you’d swear it’s as much of a fable as the novel that came out of it. You have Lord Byron, a scandal-ridden celebrity; Percy Bysshe Shelley, a rising star in the world of poetry; and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of two of Britain’s most famous philosophers. Count also Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont and Byron’s attendant, Dr. John Polidori. From that Alpine summer came the third canto of Byron’s Childe Harold; Polidori’s The Vampyre, which gave birth to Western vampire fiction; and Mary Shelley’s own Frankenstein, which dwarfed them both by orders of magnitude.

In light of the creative output of that summer, it’s easy to overlook the sticky web of romance and scandal that bound the participants together, although perhaps it’s the proximate cause. Mary and Percy were sleeping together but weren’t married, partly due to Percy’s theories on free love and partly because he wasn’t yet divorced from his first wife, Harriet. They traveled with Claire, who may have been in love with Percy but was definitely infatuated with Byron and already pregnant with his child. Byron himself was fleeing scandal in Britain, eager for separation from his wife Isabella yet still wanting custody of their daughter. And Dr. Polidori’s literary aspirations were clear but were not much humored by his companions.

Emily Dendinger’s Hideous Progeny takes that source material and casts it into a weekend of gossip and high drama. When Byron challenges the company to come up with an original ghost story over the next three days, it touches off a chain of intrigue and recrimination. Everyone gets their old grudges out, accusing each other of slights and hiding behind ideals or intoxication. It’s sordid, biting, passionate and petty – a story of relationship breakdown in the tradition of The Lion in Winter or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Dendinger wrote one of the tightest, cleverest scripts I’ve seen in contemporary theater. There’s more drama crammed into the first act than you’d find in most modern plays: Mary confronting Byron; Byron teasing and avoiding Clare by turns; Percy and Mary saying plenty and leaving more unsaid. A subplot between Dr. Polidori and Elise, the hired maid, adds a touch of uplift to what could otherwise be a dark and bitter story. But even the feuds have their levity, when the author – or the characters, themselves authors – take a moment to comment on the absurdity of their situation.

Nathaniel Gundy (Shelley) does an excellent job with a tricky role. He ignores Mary’s needs for affection, acknowledgment and legitimacy not because he’s an asshole, but because he’s consumed by his own beliefs. He’s a hyper-rational ideologue who doesn’t understand why everyone is so mad at him, a character type that’s rarely explored in literature and is tough to make sympathetic. Maggie Erwin (Claire) and Julia Specht (Mary) bring gravity and passion to their very young characters, particularly when Claire reveals that she has a brain in her head and ambitions of her own. Or when Mary sits, jaw agape in disgust, as Victor Shopov’s Byron teases her for failing to live up to the expectations of her literary heritage, or having killed her mother in childbirth. Alex Simoes (Polidori) has particularly excellent comic timing, a master of several small gestures and expressions that had the audience howling.

The black box at the Boston Playwrights Theatre, though excellently appointed, felt a bit cramped. One scene featured Percy literally wedged between a writing desk and a large metal bracket in the wall, having an argument across the room with Mary. The lighting lacked variety: while it was easy to tell a 4am confession from a 7pm argument, it was impossible to tell dinner time from breakfast. Costumes, however, were excellent, particularly Byron’s several outfits. The set decoration itself was full of perfect little details, giving the stage the feel of a lived-in summer cabin: packed to overflowing with books, and too cramped to avoid each other after a fight. Of which there are several.

Jun

conscience is but a word that cowards use

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Richard III: A surreal, bloody and glib adaptation of Shakespeare’s favorite schemer. Richard Clothier brings to Richard, Duke of Gloucester the one element hardest to find: good comic timing. His attempts to charm the widow Anne and to wheedle his way into the crown are played for laughs, even while everyone around him is horrified at his excess. This makes the brutal murders which comprise the plot easier to stomach.

Also some excellent comic turns by the two murderers (Richard Frame, Sam Swainsbury). Projection could have used a little work: some of the words got lost in the eaves as the cast directed their lines to the echoing industrial set. Good use of wood block percussion and chainsaws.

Apr

book of days

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I’d tell you to see Bad Habit Productions’ staging of Book of Days, but I saw it on its last weekend. Like an idiot. Because I could have seen it when it opened and then told all of you to see it.

The tricky part about being a critic is having to remind people that you’re a critic, which I do by using lots of critical, polysyllabic language. I talk about the pros and cons of a given piece of art, compare it to other works in the same genre, and try to close with something clever. It’s a lot of effort for something small and local, and it’s a ridiculous amount of effort for something I’m doing without pay. But it enhances my ability to appreciate art, particularly theater, which I think needs a lot of work.

And then something like Book of Days comes along and fucks that shit to hell.

I watched the entire play, all two hours and something minutes of it, with my mouth hanging open. The language is crisply real with the appropriate hint of Neil Simon timing to make it funny, or poignant, as needed. The show introduces us to a dozen characters in the first ten minutes and makes them all distinct and human. And the story directs all this effort, this soaring cathedral of tragedy and comedy and struggling human endeavor, over a nothing of a town in Missouri! Set in the modern day, on the doorstep of the 21st century; not in the period where it’s okay to be a nothing town. Add to all that a compelling plot – a will-they or won’t-they, a whodunnit, a play-within-a-play – and it’s an astonishing triumph.

But none of this works without good actors. There are several lines – especially when the town’s wealthiest man reminisces about his son’s basketball victories, or when the protagonist’s husband waxes enthusiastic about good cheese – that could be butchered by a mediocre actor. Or even by a good actor who tried too hard. Thankfully everything moves and flows in a way that keeps the audience engaged. Everyone’s good, but three players in particular deserve praise: Chuck Schwager’s Walt, the owner of the factory that keeps the town going, who’s both respected and hated at the same time, full of folksy wisdom but blind to the realities in front of him; Casey Preston as James, a rising political star in both the State assembly and the local church, who delivers his good ol’ boy attitude with the perfect pitch of knowing arrogance; and Anna Waldron as Ruth, who keeps heart as her world falls apart around her, drawing strength from mythology in order to cleave to what’s true.

“I feel bad about telling other people that they were ‘good’ in their shows,” I said after the play, “because I don’t have the right words for this.” It’s a fantastic effort with a fantastic piece of material. And it’s new to me, too. This new avenue has been opened up to me in Lanford Wilson’s work – a man who apparently wrote plays for four decades, which if they were half as good as this are better than most theater, and died two weeks ago. And not just a good play, but a good play done perfectly, with so much attention devoted to pacing and staging and timing and the details that bring characters to life. And it’s about a real town, filled with real people, in a real part of the world, even if it’s about the bookkeeper of a Missouri cheese factory playing Joan of Arc.

You can’t see the show now. But you can see whatever else BHP does, because they consistently pick good plays, cast good actors and then demand good performances out of them.

Feb

now you do what they told you, now you’re under control

Posted by Perich at 4:34 pm

AJAX: Brutal melodrama in an engaging new translation, with a staging that works as often as it doesn’t.

The ancient Greek tragedies struggle for a modern audience. The themes that Sophocles and Euripides wrote about – the helplessness of humans before the gods; submission to law as a virtue – don’t resonate with modern audiences.^* Also, their plays are 24 centuries old and in another language. Translation is required not only across continents – ancient Greek to American English – but across centuries as well.

The translation used in the A.R.T.’s production, in modern English by Charles Connaghan, preserves the story’s power. It avoids flowery phrases for terse, direct prose. When the Chorus complains that “all men take aim at the great,” it’s instantly clear what he means: how glory attracts envy, while the anonymous can go unchallenged.

The performances also ground the ancient story in a modern context. They’re melodramatic, sure, but it’s the melodrama of a real life tragedy – stammering, heads buried in hands, halting steps – rather than the melodrama usually associated with the stage. Linda Powell as Tecmessa is particularly good in this regard, making her plight as a woman at risk of returning to slavery compelling. Ajax (Brent Harris) avoids playing his madness as a one-note symphony – he catapults between shame, rage, confusion and the tired wisdom of remorse.

Photo courtesy of A.R.T.

To further reinforce the modern context, A.R.T. has staged Ajax in a war zone. The stage is a mess hall pavilion, its folding chairs and plastic tables strewn about in a mess. Odysseus, Ajax and the other soldiers wear desert-camo army fatigues, while the Chorus dresses like an embedded journalist. No reference is made to any specific war, because the story is not about one specific war. The madness of a hero is timeless.

As with Paradise Lost, however, A.R.T.’s use of multimedia has its hits and misses. Athena (Kaaron Briscoe) communicates with Odysseus (Ron Cephas Jones) in the first scene via radio – an excellent touch that reminds us of her all-seeing presence. But the acts are punctuated by snippets of interviews on a massive video wall. The interviews have a calm, conversational tone, conflicting with the melodramatic thrust of the play. We switch from passion and tragedy to dispassionate commentary. Sometimes the interviews add insight to the events of the previous scene; more often, they’re just distracting.

Ajax is part of a repertoire produced by Theater of War, an organization that works in conjunction with the USO to stage performances and readings of Greek tragedies in American military installations around the world. The point is to show military service members that the personal crises they suffer through are not only common to all people, but common to soldiers throughout history – even twenty-five centuries ago. Watching Ajax rant on stage, covered in the blood of cattle whom he slew in delusion, I wondered how such a story would resonate with a modern military audience. Sophocles’s story isn’t about Ajax’s prowess, or even about Ajax’s madness. Rather, it’s about people’s reaction to his madness. It’s about the gossip, mistrust, shame and remorse that blossom from one brutal incident, and how that can mar an otherwise glorious career. With Connaghan’s language, and with performances as accessible as those at the A.R.T., that story can still resonate.

Image courtesy of A.R.T.

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* Which isn’t to suggest that submission to law is no longer regarded as a virtue. Rather, it’s not portrayed as a virtue in entertainment. Pop culture celebrates rebels – the cop who doesn’t play by the rules but gets results, the kid who topples the high school hierarchy, the young couple who throw away promising careers because they’re in LOVE, etc. TV is our means of escape.

Feb

it’s okay; I know nothing’s wrong

Posted by Perich at 3:21 pm

Cymbeline: a superior production in a rather tricky space.

I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare and seen a little of it, too, but I had no familiarity with Cymbeline before this weekend. The plot itself is formulaic myth: evil stepmothers, poisons that feign death, lost princes and legendary heroes. The Actors’ Shakespeare Project takes this with a healthy dose of post-modern irony which adds a healthy dose of comedy. They also demonstrate a mastery of the language, especially in the context of performance, that makes the story easy to follow.

There’s no one in the cast who doesn’t satisfy. Ken Baltin approaches the title role with thundering dignity in a likable guise – his strong resemblance to Jose Ferrer, not just in appearance but in gravity, serves him well. De’Lon Grant navigates several of Shakespeare’s trickier passages, particularly the poetic declarations of his love’s virtue, with a conversational ease. Risher Reddick takes what could have been a minor role – that of the servant Pisanio – and shines in his trembling eagerness to live up to his master’s esteem. Neil McGarry is a perfect villain – just sleazy enough, and so cocky in his sleaziness that he fascinates us – and his scenes paired against Brooke Hardman are excellent. Hardman herself gives maturity and depth to what could easily be a shrinking lily, woe-is-me female role, and Marya Lowry delivers the commanding tones that ASP regulars can expect of her.

All that would be quite enough, and yet Lockwood casts each actor in multiple roles. So Danny Bryck, for instance, not only gets to carry himself with untouchable dignity as a Roman envoy in a hostile British court, but can pull off a hilarious comic turn as the mad Dr. Cornelius as well. Reddick excels not just as Pisanio but as the boastful younger prince. And while Grant is good enough as the faithful lover Posthumous, it’s as the foppish prince Cloten that he brings the audience to howling laughter.

The one thing lacking is the show space. I’m of course delighted that a performance space has been opened, literally, at the other end of my block. But the Storefront in Davis Square is too bright, low and open. The light’s diffused across the entire theater, rather than focused on the performance area. Sightlines are tricky as well. Lockwood, to his credit, takes advantage of this openness rather than apologizing for it. In any given scene, the unused cast sit off to one side, foleying sound effects for invisible props on stage. A letter opens with a crinkle of paper; a ring slides off a finger with a gentle rattle; the pounding of a drum advances the clash of armies.

Fortunately, the comic timing and commitment of the cast overcome the limitations of the space. Hopefully this will steer some revenue toward the Storefront that’ll improve its aesthetics. In any event, this production of Cymbeline is diverting enough to be worth seeing, regardless of the venue.

Jan

it runs in streaks

Posted by Perich at 1:58 pm

Glengarry Glen Ross: To sell anything on commission, real estate in particular, involves grappling with risk. You stake your paycheck on your ability to sell garbage to strangers. Every salesman in the Independent Drama Society’s production of Glengarry Glen Ross pats themselves on the back for living such a risky life. But all of them hate it. They’re all looking for that edge – that way to avoid the risk and still reap the rewards. They want to bribe their manager for the hot leads, or go into business for themselves, or win the sales contest for this month (what about next?). And when their efforts don’t pay off – when they land on the wrong side of risk – they fall apart.

The first act consists of three vignettes: conversations between characters in a Chinese restaurant. “Conversation” is perhaps the wrong word, since each scene is dominated by one character: Levene (Phil Thompson), pleading for a break; Moss (Craig Houk), carrying his message through sheer bullying force; Roma (Michael Fisher), bowling a prospect over like a well-staged seduction. Each of these three inhabits their dialogue so naturally – a tall order, given the way Mamet writes – that you briefly forget you’re watching a performance.

Their scene partners, by contrast, play characters: Williamson (Jeremy Browne), the inflexible office manager; Aaronow (Michael Pevzner), the buffoonish drunk; Lingk (Bob Mussett), the rube out of his depth. When I say they’re “characters” I don’t mean they’re worse actors or worse roles than the others. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with characters; trying to play Shakespeare straight would sound odd. What it creates, instead, is a fascinating energy. You have your active characters – Levene, Moss, Roma. Each of them wants to close a deal: Levene wants to buy premium leads; Moss wants Aaronow’s cooperation in a crime; Roma wants to sell some property. Each of them delivers Mamet’s dialogue with effortless naturalism. And yet it’s their characters who are, in the context of the story, putting on an act. They’re selling. They’re playing a gambit. They execute one strategy, meet resistance, and then try another.

Thompson and Houk (as Levene and Moss) deserve particular praise here. Houk gives the role of Moss a brash townie confidence, playing up the Boston accent and the volume. He speaks with confidence about subjects he couldn’t possibly know – how much Mitch and Murray paid for the premium leads – and his arrogance makes us believe him. Thompson plays Levene as a suave elder statesman, cashing in the last markers he has. It must have been a tremendous temptation to simply imitate Jack Lemmon, but Thompson’s Levene is less desperate. He’s more of a con artist, delivering his hollow rhetoric about “marshaling a sales force” and “streaks of luck” with a practiced ease. Even when he’s offering up a percentage of his commission, he passes it off as a last bid, rather than a plea.

The audience is ushered out for the set change in the second act, which struck me as a bit inconsiderate of the neighboring show. The crew does a good job creating a trashed real estate office: file cabinets broken open, papers and folders strewn across the floor. But the office doesn’t feel as claustrophobic as it should. When Levene starts laying into Williamson, or Moss into Roma, we should feel that these men are trapped – that they don’t have the option to simply walk away and not listen to the bile. But everyone has plenty of room to move.

(While I’m on the act changes, the choice of music between acts was also odd: Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” It’s not contemporary to the mid-80s setting. The tone is entirely wrong: Glengarry Glen Ross is gritty, not psychedelic. And it might be the second most over-used music cue of the last thirty years, coming just behind James Brown’s “I Feel Good”. If your music cue’s odd enough to notice, reconsider)

It’s in the second act that Browne (as Williamson) really comes into his own. His character goes through the harshest narrative arc in the show – on top of the world in Act 1, confused and harried in the first half of Act 2, laid low by spoiling Roma’s shot, then back on top by the end. Browne plays a flustered Williamson better than a cocky Williamson, but that’s to the character’s benefit: Williamson lording his power over Levene should be petty, not triumphant. Fisher (as Roma) also shines brighter in Act 2 than in Act 1. As Roma spinning a line of patter, he’s fine; as Roma reacting to Moss’s tantrum, he’s perfect. And kudos to Mussett for taking a role with almost no lines and giving it character. He says more with a hand across his mouth and a look to the floor than most can with the best lines in the world.

“It’s a fucked-up world,” Roma observes in the second act. “There’s no adventure to it.” Glengarry Glen Ross is about risk, the variable that makes something an adventure. Men ask other men to take risks for them: for Lingk to trust Roma, for Williamson to help Levene, for Aaronow to do a job for Moss. By the end of the play, none of the risks have paid off. The adventure has failed. And when you define your manhood by your ability to seek out and master risk, what do you do next? What’s left, when that is gone?

Dec

told you I’ll be here forever

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Her Red Umbrella: A high energy bedroom farce that benefits from excellent casting.

Her Red Umbrella follows five Harvard students on a tour of Europe, studying Romantic literature and learning more about themselves. One of them is a dorky archaeology student who’s always dreamed of traveling abroad. One’s a TA with a reputation for being a ladykiller. One’s an investment banking intern (or graduate? it’s not clear) who needs to be wrangled into cutting loose. And one’s not a Harvard student at all. The ancient allure of Europe works its magic on them until they find themselves in a comical string of circumstances, making idiots of themselves for love.

The dialogue is stiff and artificial at times, so it falls to the actors to make it work. Thankfully, this show is exceptionally well cast, with the bubbly Cara (Erika Geller) giving life to a rather stock type (the Manic Pixie Dream Girl). Cara is best friends with Justine (Lydia Barnett-Mulligan), a perfect comic foil, who delivers the most melodramatic lines with expert timing and pitch to heighten the play’s ridiculous energy. Once you get past Bastian’s (Noah Tobin) ridiculous French accent, you find a source of energy and comic inspiration: a frenetic muse who drags the story along with him during the slower moments. Ellis, the professor (Evan Quinlan), is one of those stock British types who only exists in Joss Whedon shows: adorable, flustered, poised and full of rhetoric. He’s a character, but he’s an entertaining character, and entertainment forgives all.

Casting the author of the show (Brian Tuttle) as a young writer who’s critically acclaimed but largely unknown is a bit on-the-nose (to borrow the unfortunate cliche). Sadly, he’s the least interesting character in the ensemble. Fortunately, Tuttle makes up in passion what the character lacks in depth. Portraying a hesitant character with verve and energy takes a lot of talent (and probably a lot of good direction as well, by 11:11 regular Robyn Linden), and Tuttle pulls it off. The story moves at a good clip, introduces plenty of interesting characters, and alternates between sentiment and humor with good pacing. Eliminating two scenes (the first and the seventh) would make the show perfect. But then, the moral of the play is that no romantic fantasy ever turns out perfect. Perhaps the show ought to be the same.

Nov

with a hey and a ho and a hey-nonny-no

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

As You Like It is, while still a popular Shakespeare play, still debated in merit. A lot of scholars see the plot as frivolous. What tension there is comes out of Rosalind’s insistence on playing a game with her suitor’s heart while in the forest of Arden. It’s rather like a sitcom, where one character has to carry the “Idiot Ball” to get the plot to go. And yet, As You Like It is still well loved (that’s one of the reasons I picked it, after all). Partly because it’s funny, partly because there are entertaining exchanges when the main characters have good chemistry, and partly because the theme – that love makes fools of everyone – still resonates.

The Longwood Players, just wrapping their fall performance of As You Like It, introduced some interesting conceits to the production. Some didn’t really work, like having the cast sit in the audience and take to the stage, donning their costumes anew, as they began each scene. The act of changing in and out of each costume created a lot of visual noise onstage that distracted from the scene. It looked especially ridiculous in some of the usurping Duchess’s shorter scenes – entering, just finishing tying on her bustle as she delivered her last line, then exiting.

However, the conceit of addressing the minor characters in the plot did work. They broke the fourth wall just long enough to drag the “usher” onstage, thrusting a script into his hands and casting him as Dennis, Charles the wrestler, Corin the old shepherd, Amiens of the exiled Duke’s retinue, and so on. This gag took a while to pay off and jeopardized a few scenes in the meantime, such as Touchstone’s “Instance, briefly; come, instance” scene with Corin. However, it paid off big by the end, so I can’t complain that much.

And the performances themselves were all fine. Rosalind (Joy Lamberton^*) and Celia (Anna Waldron) had the flawless chemistry they needed to make those roles work; both have excellent comic timing and good sincerity. Jaques (Anthony Mullin) played Shakespeare’s most verbose fool with just the right touch of pomposity, while Touchstone (James Aitchison) navigated several tricky speeches with perfect delivery. I’d never seen a performance of As You Like It which cast Phebe (Sierra Nicole Kagan) as a frumpy bully rather than a prissy bitch, but it worked hilariously well here. And Greg Nussen was wasted in the role of Silvius; he had the comic timing and charm to carry the lead role.

^*Apparently an understudy or a late change to the cast, as she’s not the actor pictured in the press release photo above. She pulled it off flawlessly, so the director got lucky.