Monday, September 4, 2000
'Love's' charms found
Jazz Age ambience infuses inventive CSF season-ender
ORINDA, CA - The play is by Shakespeare but the costumes suggest the 1920s. The lines are
from "Love's Labour's Lost" but the actors keep bursting into song. No, it's not Kenneth Branagh's film musical version of one of Shakespeare's least loved comedies. That was set in the '30s and these actors are live and onstage. Besides, the California Shakespeare Festival's version of the play is bound to run longer than Branagh's film lasted when it opened here in June.
The final offering in this year's CSF season, "Love's" opened Saturday in the festival's Bruns Memorial Amphitheater high in the Berkeley Hills. Given the difficulties of the text, and considering how badly the film flopped, the success of Lisa Peterson's production is nothing short of remarkable. The festival gods seem to be smiling on Jonathan Moscone's first season as artistic director. Even the atypical September storm that threatened the opening had blown over. The evening was chilly but calm.
Peterson's "Love's" provides a stunning payoff to Moscone's decision to dismantle the festival's former Tudor-façade standing set. Kate Edmunds contributes the most beautiful design in the festival's history at the Bruns.
Edmunds, whose work is usually seen at ACT and Berkeley Rep, makes her CSF debut by not only opening the stage to the rolling hills beyond but bringing them onstage. Her set is an undulating grassy knoll studded with saplings, with a low bridge leading to the King of Navarre's court on one side and the awning of the visiting Princess of France's pavilion on the other. Christopher Akerlind's lights cleverly highlight the trees on and beyond the stage and provide sudden washes of sunlight whenever a hypocrisy is exposed or a revel interrupted.
The setting is as apt as it is delightful, given that all the action takes place between the entrances to the king's court and the visitors' tent. It's even more apt for Peterson's production, which turns Shakespeare's most esoteric comedy - so filled with archaic puns and convoluted lampoons of long-defunct literary styles that it epitomizes everything bardophobes hate about his plays - into a leisurely Jazz Age lawn party of a beguiling entertainment.
Meg Neville's breezy flapper costumes contribute greatly to the effect, with their clinging deco
lines and cubist ornaments. KT Nelson's sly Charleston and two-step infused choreography plays its part as well. Gina Leishman's delightful score sells the concept with infectiously light melodies - played by an onstage guitar, bass and accordion trio (Will Bernard, Nick Cudahy and Odile Lavault) - setting songs and some dialogue to snatches of jazz, period standards, flamenco and even a bit of "Carmen."
Peterson has cut some of the play's more problematic, academic passages, enlivened repartee with musical settings and modernized key words for comic effect. Mostly, though, she simply plays to its strengths: its youthful exuberance, the vitality of some of its characters and the somber tones of its refreshingly atypical ending - in which the women, instead of jumping into the marriages that end the other comedies, give their swains a year to grow up before accepting them ("Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill").
She peppers the production with inventive touches - an exceptionally cute little goat, actors diving into an offstage pool, performance references to Amelia Earhart and Stepin Fetchit, a backdrop for the play-within-the-play that repeats the rolling-hills motif. And she mirrors Leishman's score with a musical pacing that plays off the quick and symphonic ensemble scenes against the still focus of the solo passages.
For the most part, her cast responds with acute performances. L. Peter Callender is a particularly clear and intelligent King, as passionate in his commitment to scholarship as he will become infatuated with Nancy Carlin's chic, smart Princess. It's the king's academic obsession that provides the main plot complication. He and his three lords have just taken a vow to eschew the company of women for three years of concentrated studies when the princess arrives on a diplomatic mission with three ladies, each ideally suited to one of the men.
Callender and Carlin make their problematic romance a delight, from their ruffled composure the moment they lay eyes on each other - which Peterson delectably delays, whetting our expectations - to their electrically charged parting. Jonathan Haugen's Berowne and Florencia Lozano's Rosaline,
by Robert Hurwitt
EXAMINER THEATER CRITIC
©2000 San Francisco Examiner
Gerald Hiken is comically fantastical as Don Adriano de Armado, the vain, word-twisting Spanish knight, touchingly funny in his discomfiture. Colman Domingo is a resourceful, buoyant Costard, the pomposity-puncturing rustic. Julian López-Morillas savors the pompous utterances of the pedantic Holofernes, brightly supported by Luis Oropeza's eager, admiring Nathaniel and Soren Oliver's deliciously slow-witted Dull.
Julie Eccles is intriguingly androgynous as a blithely butch Boyet. Emily Ackerman is a sassy dairymaid with a soft heart. Brady Gill's bumptious page, David Lee Thomason's somber Marcade and the lesser lords and ladies of Phil Young, Ariel Shafir, Genevieve Lee and Moya Furlow provide capable support.
Oddly, this has been quite a summer for this least popular of Shakespeare's comedies, what with Branagh's film and stagings here, at Shakespeare Santa Cruz and San Diego's Old Globe (directed by Roger Rees). Peterson's version isn't as clever as Daniel
Fish's was in Santa Cruz (I didn't see the others), nor quite as funny in its exploitation of the verbal humor. It is, however, more deeply felt, more electric in its romantic entanglements and ultimately more intriguing and satisfying.
Theater Review
'Love's Labour's Lost'
PLAYWRIGHT: William Shakespeare
DIRECTOR: Lisa Peterson
CAST: Jonathan Haugen, Florencia Lozano, L. Peter Callender, Nancy Carlin, Gerald Hiken, Colman Domingo
THEATER California Shakespeare Festival, Orinda, through Sept. 23 (510-548-9666 or www.calshakes.org)
Monday, September 4, 2000
Cal Shakes makes light work of 'Love's Labor's'
Direction, staging and acting pull together to turn an otherwise ponderous play into a delightful, breezy affair
by Georgia Rowe
ORINDA, CA -- Fall weather swept into the Bay Area over the weekend, and as temperatures dropped Saturday night at the Bruns Amphitheater, those audience members who arrived in T-shirts and shorts quickly got the message that summer was over. It might as well have been spring onstage, though, as the California Shakespeare Festival opened a bright, winsome new production of "Love's Labor's Lost."
Under the direction of Lisa Peterson, Shakespeare's dizzy comedy about four aristocratic young scholars who take a vow of celibacy -- and the four young women with whom they fall madly in love -- gets a staging that generates a fair amount of heat on its own.
Peterson, an Obie Award-winning director making her Cal Shakes debut, scores with nearly every directorial choice. With a skilled, unified cast and an attractive Roaring '20s setting, her production -- the final offering of Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone's first season -- goes a long way toward overcoming the play's inherent weaknesses.
"Love's Labor's Lost" is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, and it isn't one of his greatest. It simply isn't as well-plotted as his later comedies -- plays such as "Twelfth Night" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream." And although it contains some of those plays' best elements -- young lovers trying to find expression, the humorous contrast between high ideals and low humor -- the script tends to be longwinded and a little cerebral.
In some productions, all that verbiage can be deadly. But Peterson's 3-hour staging makes light work of the more ponderous passages. The director underscores some of them with broad physical shtick and excises a few altogether.
She also sets lines of text into the fast-moving, lighthearted Parisian café tunes (composed by Gina Leishman, and played by an onstage trio consisting of Will Bernard, Nick Cudahy and Odile Lavault) that punctuate the show throughout.
And, Peterson frames the action in Cal Shakes' most eye-catching designs of the season. Kate Edmunds' handsome set -- a verdant slope of lawn shaded by young saplings -- seems an extension of the rolling hills surrounding the Bruns. Christopher Akerlind's lighting gives the scene a natural look, and Meg Neville's fabulously witty costumes highlight the contrasts between the nobles and the rustics inhabiting the countryside.
The play begins with Ferdinand, King of Navarre (an earnest L. Peter Callender) pressing three of his followers into service. Along with Berowne (Jonathan Haugen), Dumaine (Ariel Shafir) and Longaville (Phil Young), the king plans to seclude himself for three years of study, fasting and contemplation. Berowne, the quartet's wiseacre, is reluctant to sign away his freedom, but they all take the oath -- just before word arrives that the princess of France is coming for a visit with three ladies-in-waiting.
Things heat up as soon as the girls arrive, dressed in flapper dresses and ready for a good time. The clever dialogue, spiced with double entendres, begins to fly, and there's a lot of chemistry and an agreeable symmetry as the king falls for the princess (a cheery, loose-limbed Nancy Carlin). Berowne pairs off with Rosaline (an incisive Florencia Lozano), Dumaine with Katherine (Genevieve Lee), and Longaville with Maria (Moya Furlow). A servant to the Princess (Julie Eccles dressed in androgynous suits for the part of Boyet, usually played by a man) offers wry commentary on the ensuing love-fest.
The locals, meanwhile, provide a more down-to-earth view of love. Costard (Colman Domingo) forsakes a goat-toting milkmaid (Emily Ackerman as a surly Jacquenetta), even as a slightly unhinged Spanish knight (Gerald Hiken as Don Adriano), aided by an energetic page (Brady Gill as Moth), vows to woo her. A comic trio (Julian Lopez-Morillas as the pedantic Holofernes, Luis Oropeza as the curate Nathaniel, and Soren Oliver as Constable Dull) adds to the fun. David Lee Thomason doubles as Marcade and the Forester.
Act II peaks with a merry charade, as the nobles come disguised as Muscovites to court the princess and her women.
The momentum slows down a bit in the ensuing play-within-a-play, with the locals enacting the deeds of Hercules, Alexander and other superheroes, but picks up again in the show's final scene. Love, of course, triumphs over all.
There isn't a weak link in the cast. Callender's guileless King is a pleasure to watch, and Haugen's Berowne is aptly jovial. Carlin's airy princess, and Lozano's whip-smart Rosaline, match them scene for scene. But it's the comic roles that give the show its horsepower, especially Domingo's wily Costard, Hiken's bombastic Don, and Oliver's delightfully blank Dull. Together, the company makes this "Love's Labor's" work, putting the cap on what has been a very strong season for Cal Shakes.
TIMES CORRESPONDENT
Cal Shakespeare's `Labour' of Love
Deft directing, set design in season's last production
Steven Winn, Chronicle Theater Critic
Monday, September 4, 2000
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST: Comedy. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Lisa Peterson. (Through Sept. 23. At the Bruns Memorial Amphitheatre, Gateway exit off Highway 24, Orinda. Tickets: $21-$38. Call (510) 548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org)
Sometimes, when a show sags at the California Shakespeare Festival, the view of tawny hills and wind-tossed treetops fading into darkness can be the most pleasant thing about a night at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheatre. In the company's limber and lilting new production of ``Love's Labour's Lost,'' the Orinda countryside rolls right onto the stage and swallows it up.
Kate Edmunds' set design -- ``landscape design'' is more like it -- is a startling, lovable piece of work. Swelling hills, slender trees, flower beds and freshly mown grass replace any semblance of scenic artifice. A live band and live goat share this all-natural rendition of a French countryside retreat where four men go to swear off women and other distractions and devote themselves to a three-year course of study.
Director Lisa Peterson does plenty to delight the eye and ear. Four women -- who promptly spoil the book-learning scheme by snaring the men's attention -- wear a fashion catalog's worth of 1920s flapper gowns (by Meg Neville). Gina Leishman's score adds whiffs of tango, jazz, beer- garden waltzes and Bizet's ``Carmen.'' There's a swimming hole sight gag, an athletic singing page (Brady Gill) and a pedantic coot (Julian Lopez-Morillas) who could hold down a post at Kay Kyser's College of Musical Knowledge.
As Kenneth Branagh did in his ``Love's Labour's Lost'' film, Peterson treats Shakespeare's linguistically rich but somewhat static comedy as an occasion for larky word- and music-play. The characters are forever riffing Shakespeare's moon-eyed verse and malaprop-filled jokes into impromptu songs and vaudevillian routines.
Gerald Hiken, as the Spanish knight Don Adriano de Armado, goes bug-eyed at the sound of his own florid love letters. Colman Domingo, who plays the country boy Costard, can switch gears and crank up some new verbal style at the flip of an internal switch. The show ends with a choral production number for the entire cast.
But Peterson, a noted freelance director of new plays who staged a bold bare-stage ``Antony and Cleopatra'' at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1998, isn't merely strutting her musical -- comedy stuff. Almost everything here is a keenly judged response to the play's reflections on love, language, self-deception and the revealing deceits of theater itself.
The set, for all its growing greenery, is in fact a carefully tamed contrivance. This meditative site chosen by the King of Navarre and his three lords is about as authentically natural as a suburban park, complete with a wooden footbridge and Japanese lanterns strung up at night.
That's a fitting realm for these four dabblers, who enter in graduation robes singing the Latin school song ``Gaudeamus igitur'' at the top of their innocent lungs. When they take a blood oath to seal their vows of ascetic scholarship, they wince and wind up with bandaged palms.
``Love's Labour's Lost'' is about the growing awareness of real life, the depths and shadows that fill in around characters who begin by playing at love and wind up confronting its real wounds and costs. Here's one comedy that doesn't end with a slew of marriages.
That idea of separation is sealed, in the play's most haunting gesture, by the notion that actors go one way and audiences the other at the end of the night. Art and life diverge. The play's love poetry burns away like so much mist, leaving the demands of love itself behind. The festival's production is very good in drawing out that transitory, theatrical theme. The nostalgic '20s costumes, the sighing accordion and harmonica melodies and Christopher Akerlind's sharp-edged spotlights all contribute. So does Peterson's sly appropriation of various performance styles, including the arresting use of a minstrel show.
The acting by the four couples is able enough but never quite seems as rich and fully fleshed as Peterson's staging. Jonathan Haugen gives a firm and tender account of Berowne's witty prevarications. Florencia Lozano makes a worthy match for him as Rosaline, with her ringing voice and unflappable presence. L. Peter Callender is a bright King, a squeaky stammer betraying his steely self-possession. Nancy Carlin has her endearing moments as the Princess of France.
``Love's Labour's Lost'' is ideally placed at the end of the outdoor season at the Bruns. As summer ends, nature flaunts itself one last time before the serious business of fall and winter begins. Like the play's lovers, we all agree to wait and let love steep more deeply in our hearts for another year. ..
(Page G1) ©2000 San Francisco Chronicle
September 8, 2000
Bosky Bard Boffo in Varying Venues
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Lisa Peterson. With L. Peter Callender, Jonathan Haugen, Nancy Carlin, Florencia Lozano
By Katy E. Shrout
Love's Labour's Lost
Much like the filmmaking minds behind Meatballs, Shakespeare understood that something weird and wiggy happens to people when they spend too much time outside. I, for one, begin getting inexplicably itchy. The character Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream turns into an ass. And in Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like It, which are both staged al fresco this week in the East Bay, uptight courtly types get a chance to break free of their rigid rules and get busy under the stars. "It looks just like a golf course," exclaimed a fellow audience member in delight, at seeing the Bruns Memorial Amphitheatre’s stage. I’m fairly certain he meant it as a compliment, and I’ll second the sentiment. The picture-perfect set for Love’s Labour’s Lost at Cal Shakes, designed by Kate Edmonds, is a vividly green pasture: swelling hills onstage, coated with real grass and trees, seamlessly echoing the motif of the blond Orinda hills behind the stage.
It’s the first clue that this production is going to be visually lovely, and lovely it is. In director Lisa Peterson’s snappy, brightly hued, 1920s-era staging, characters carefully eat ice cream, play tennis, and"in a nifty illusion"leap off the back of the set into a make-believe lake, followed by a convincing splash. A Dorothy Parker-esque smart aleck sucks seductively (if not politically correctly) on cigarettes. And to complete the holiday mood, there’s an onstage jazz trio, ready to accompany original songs from the text.
Oh, it’s not so much an original take. This very summer, Kenneth Branagh’s film version chose a similarly frothy tone, framing the story as a 1930s Hollywood musical, so one wonders if this version isn’t poorly timed. But the era of cigarette holders and pastel suits lends itself well to the play’s youth-centered, light-as-champagne sparring, which has more inside jokes and inscrutable puns than any other comedy. Written almost entirely in rhyming verse, it has a verbal rhythm that naturally connotes jazz. A lot of care has gone into making sure the period props and costumes are integrated consistently into the story. Add a stellar cast to this mix, and it’s a remarkably engaging production to watch.
The plot kicks off with a weird male-bonding ritual: The young King of Navarre (L. Peter Callender) and three of his best buddies"among them the charming smartass Berowne (Jonathan Haugen)"vow to devote three years to studying while giving up earthly pleasures, excessive sleep, and women. As soon as they make their vow, they receive news that they’re going to be visited by the Princess of France (Nancy Carlin) and her three hottie ladies-in-waiting, among them the sexy smartass Rosaline (Florencia Lozano). To keep themselves from temptation, the guys ask the ladies to camp out in the field outside their quarters, so naturally that’s where the resulting romantic tangles take place.
This production is chock-full of polished actors, not the least of whom is Colman Domingo as Costard, the couples’ comic go-between. His dialogue has some of the play’s most difficult, dated puns, but the comically gifted Domingo sure milks an awful lot of laughs. (His African-American Costard even pokes fun at the upper class’ perception of him by tap-dancing and grovelling facetiously.) Also spot-on is Gerald Hiken as the comic, foolishly sentimental Spanish knight Armado, who doesn’t sacrifice his lines to his goofy accent and has an admirably old-school sense of timing. The beautiful Lozano is luminous and self-possessed as Rosaline, strutting across the stage delivering choice Shakespearean zingers.
But the exceptional thing about Love’s Labour’s Lost is that it doesn’t end exactly how you would expect it to. In a play about language, the language of love is doubted and called into question, and the significance of this ending gets a bit lost in this production. The dark elements introduced are too little, too late, so that the unexpected arrival of real-world eventualities at the end"and the lovers’ call to responsible behavior"seems sort of tacked-on. I found myself wishing the ending were as well integrated into the production as the exquisite details of the period setting.
[the writer goes into a review of another production, "As You Like It"]
These two productions definitely appeal to different parts of the theatergoing anatomy. They’re intended for different tastes and different budgets, but that doesn’t make one a more authentic interpretation than the other. Both have their flaws and shortcomings, but both serve as potent examples of why Shakespeare’s every bit as timelessly funny and clever as those guys who wrote Meatballs.