Where de Boys are

As You Like It any way you like it

by Carolyn Clay

AS YOU LIKE IT. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Musical direction and new music composed by Amanda Dehnert. Set and lighting design by Eugene Lee. Costumes by William Lane. Choreography by Sharon Jenkins. Fight choreography by Normand Beauregard. With Timothy Crowe, Mauro Hantman, Anne Scurria, Peter Papadopoulos, Timothy Smith, Dan Welch, Eric Tucker, Robert J. Colonna, Fred Sullivan Jr., Barbara Meek, William Damkoehler, Jennifer Mudge Tucker, Phyllis Kay, Cynthia Strickland, Janice Duclos, and musicians Kevin Fallon, Rachel Maloney, and Chris Turner. At Trinity Repertory Companye, through March 7.

In Trinity Repertory Company's As You Like It, the shepherd Silvius makes his first entrance towing a dog in sheep's clothing. Silvius's charge is played by a little black and brown terrier in a sheepskin cloak, around the edges of which peep his dog's head and limbs. And the production's like that too -- a motley blanket of inventive high jinks and music, around the edges of which peeps Shakespeare's pastoral comedy of exiled courtiers and ladies finding true love and meaning in the Forest of Arden. Director Oskar Eustis and his whacked-out, accomplished troupe of mummer/musicians throw everything at As You Like It but confetti.

In a production that straddles time from the 1950s to the early '70s, the exiled Duke Senior and his band of attendants cavort in an Arden that's part boy-scout camp, part Robert Bly retreat. Touchstone drives a golf cart with a fully stocked liquor cabinet. The mournful "Blow, blow, thou winter wind" is cranked into an upbeat hootenanny. Shakespeare's third act includes a ballet for the duke's men, in pink tutus, and an assortment of wood-carved forest creatures. And act five is a rock-opera version of Joey and Maria's Comedy Wedding featuring an eight-person combo ("The Banished Duke's Pages"), a gospel-rocking Hymen (with choir), and a prep-school Jerry Lee Lewis as the good-news-bearing second son of Sir Roland de Boys. Rosalind's epilogue is replaced by a full-scale boogie, with the quadruple-wedding party singing "YMCA." Oh, and did I forget to mention the Balinese puppet play depicting Orlando's rescue of his bad brother that gets performed behind a sheet hung on Rosalind and Celia's clothesline?

Whether this is as you like it probably depends on who "you" are. Harold Bloom would put the production under cultural arrest. The legions of high-schoolers who attend under the auspices of Trinity's Project Discovery program may decide the Bard's a bundle of fun, after all. For the rest of us, it remains to be amazed and amused while mourning the loss of some of the play's poetry and musings on nature and redemption. It is, after all, difficult to listen carefully to Duke Senior discoursing on how "this our life exempt from public haunt/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything" while watching him operate an outdoor shower.

There is, however, so much ebullience in the production that it's difficult to resist -- even when you have the sneaking suspicion that some of the antics have as their express purpose to keep us from being bored by Shakespeare. That's annoying because As You Like It is a sparkler on its own, with its spunky, intelligent heroine, Rosalind; the sage mix of repartee and emotion in the cross-dressed courtship between her and Orlando; and the rich philosophic jousting between the melancholy Jaques and the courtier/fool Touchstone, here a dapper Brooklynese dispenser of martinis and cheeky sense. The other thing that's vaguely annoying in all the romping and stomping is that Jennifer Mudge Tucker, when she's not kibitzing or shrieking in accord with the proceedings, brings a real intensity and yearning (not to mention sideburns) to the fathoms-deep-in-love Rosalind.

Of course, Rosalind is supposed to be cross-dressed. Eustis broadens the notion, setting up an Arden in which "sweet are the uses" not just of adversity but of polymorphous perversity. Country curate Sir Oliver Martext removes his cassock to reveal a slip and stockings. Orlando spends much of the production's second act in a kilt, presumably to counter Rosalind's boyish exterior with a girlish one. And a vigorous Anne Scurria plays Jaques in a mannish wig and a gray flannel suit, only to unmask herself in the end as a woman.

Among the performers, standouts include Fred Sullivan Jr.'s high-life Touchstone (who stirs a bloody mary while Barbara Meek's sage-bumpkin Corin shovels ersatz sheep shit) and Timothy Crowe as a mean, muscular Duke Frederick and a laid-back lumberjack of a Duke Senior. Eric Tucker's a moony yet manly Orlando. And under the direction of Amanda Dehnert, there is a lot of musical showboating, notably by Mauro Hantman as a folk-singing Amiens, Timothy Smith as the rockin' Jaques de Boys, Sullivan Jr. and Janice Duclos turning "It was a lover and his lass" into a lounge act, and versatile instrumentalists Kevin Fallon, Rachel Maloney, and Chris Turner. "I can suck melancholy out of a song," declares Jaques, "as a weasel sucks eggs." But for the most part, what's here for the sucking is toe-tapping, hand-clapping joy.