Shakespeare Festival returns with raucous, ridiculous ‘As You Like It’
“As You Like It” is all escapism all the time, as the Greater Hartford Shakespeare makes its noisy, silly return to the University of St. Joseph lawn.
The last show the troupe did before COVID was another comedy, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and they’ve already announced yet another, “Much Ado About Nothing,” for next year.
There are more fantastical Shakespeare comedies than “As You Like It.” The action is over the top, but takes place in real places like wrestling rings and meadows. There are no fairy creatures or enchantments.
One of the bard’s most famous and eloquent speeches, “All the world’s a stage,” is unleashed, but in a casual, conversational manner rather than a sober soliloquy. Even the obligatory highborn authority figures are more down to earth — we’re talking about duchesses, not monarchs or gods. Yes, there’s a woman masquerading as a man, but the plot doesn’t venture into separated-twin
IF YOU GO: or long-lost-day territory. It’s mostly a matter-of-fact meditation on the various types of romantic love.
Yet the way this “As You Like It” likes it is as cartoonish as possible. The set is a platform painted bright green, yellow and blue, strewn with ribbons. Director (and festival co-founder) Geoffrey Sheehan makes the play a mad dance, spiked with sight gags and musical numbers played on jaw harp and one of those kooky little keyboards that you play by blowing through a plastic tube. (An accomplished musician, Jaeme Brennan Mcdonald, in onstage with his keyboards for the whole performance to make sure the bigger song and dance numbers resonate.)
This is the 30th anniversary of Capital Classics holding outdoor Shakespeare shows, the longest-lasting endeavor of its kind in a state that, most years, can boast at least half a dozen companies doing this sort of thing. While a new one, Playhouse on Park’s Connecticut Shakespeare Festival, appeared this year, others have had to revise what they usually do; the largest outdoor Shakespeare company in Connecticut, Elm Shakespeare, will be doing a single week of youth theater adaptations of the bard instead of the accustomed big multi-week production.
“As You Like It,” though, looks and acts like any of the Capital Classics summer Shakespeare shows that have preceded it.
You wouldn’t know that they’ve taken a year off, or that there’s been a pandemic. There’s the same gaggle-of-friends community feel. There are many familiar faces: Geoffrey Sheehan directs his daughter Kiera Sheehan as Rosalind and his wife Laura Sheehan as “Duchess Senior” (a gender variation on the original play’s Duke Senior), the invaluable and ubiquitous local performer Debra Walsh (in a variety of small roles) unleashes an arsenal of amusing facial reactions to all the silliness onstage and Nick Roesler (Falstaff two summers ago in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”) is a handsomely goofy Jacques. Roesler delivers “All the world’s a stage” using his audience as props; when he talks about a soldier, he gestures to Orlando and uses the Duchess to represent a Justice.
As is usual for this festival, many of the younger players hail from theater programs at The Hartt School and Uconn. Recent Hartt grad Eddie Cruz
Jr. is the jester Touchstone, and has wisely determined that he needs to ad lib quite a bit to make sure he gets the laughs a constant clown deserves. Cruz has just the right energy and attitude to pull this off.
There are some vulgarisms that might make parents glance at their kids to see if they’re scandalized or jubilant, but it should be said that Shakespeare got there first with several iterations of the word “slut” and the evocative phrase “The horn, the horn, the lusty horn.”
The Greater Hartford Shakespeare Festival is unabashed Elizabeth pomp and fun outdoors. You can’t stop them dancing and singing. “As You Like It” is one big “Welcome Back!”