The music video approach to Shakespeare
If it is the food of life, it certainly plays on (and well) in this film adaptation of Twelfth Night
Barry Avrich’s direction of the film version of Des Mcanuff’s Twelfth Night is so zippy and zesty it’s not surprising he treated the movie “almost as a series of music videos.”
That might sound like heresy to a Shakespearean purist, but anyone who enjoyed the critically acclaimed production at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival last summer will realize the secret of its success was a seductive pop-rock score by Mcanuff and Michael Roth blended with a crystal-clear, very funny reading of the text by the likes of Brian Dennehy and Stephen Ouimette.
Avrich has been a producer on previous Stratford stage-to-screen collaborations Caesar and Cleopatra and The Tempest, both starring recent Oscar winner Christopher Plummer.
Mcanuff, who directed those plays, had kept a close eye on the creative end, but this year was different.
“It all came together rather quickly and we realized that Des was going to be out of town, prepping the transfer of Jesus Christ Superstar to the La Jolla Playhouse,” Avrich says from his Toronto office.
“But we’d worked together so closely in the past that he had no trouble with my directing it.”
Avrich “didn’t want it to be just an archival reproduction of what was onstage. We used dollies, we used jibs, we took the audience into the film instead of just leaving them sitting there in the theatre.” The real difference is the almostconstant underpinning of music in the show. “Usually in Shakespeare, you cut on the line. In this production, I often found myself cutting on the beat. That’s how musical it is.” Avrich takes pride in the recording studio quality of the sound: it was all done live, at one performance, with no sweetening later on. “We brought in a major mobile sound truck with 128 tracks. We recorded everything then and there and didn’t go back to do any replacements.”
One of the standouts in the cast is Shaw and Stratford veteran Ben Carlson.
Mcanuff brought Carlson’s hidden rock musician to the foreground, first in As You Like It, then in Twelfth Night, where his Feste is an aging hippie jester who can sing in every style from Dylan to Springsteen.
“Ben is a natural. All you have to do is direct him to get lost in his performance and the environment, and it’s like he had been doing film all of his life,” Avrich said. Twelfth Night will be broadcast Saturday at 12:45 p.m. at selected Cineplex theatres in the GTA. Go to www.cineplex.com/events.aspx for information. There will be an encore broadcast on March 21.