Berkshire Bard

Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost and As You Like It

by Carolyn Clay

AS YOU LIKE IT. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Barry Edelstein. Set design by Narelle Sissons. Costumes by Anita Yavich. Lighting by Rui Rita. Sound by Kurt B. Kellenberger. Music composed by Mark Bennett. Arrangement by Simon Deacon. Fight direction by J. Steven White. With Tom Bloom, John Ellison Conlee, Michael Cumpsty, Lea DeLaria, Megan Dodds, Denis Holmes, Byron Jennings, Keith Byron Kirk, Mark Linn-Baker, Bruce MacVittie, Larry Marshall, Alessandro Nivola, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Phillips, Mark K. Smaltz, Stephen Barker Turner, Sam Breslin Wright, and musicians Simon Deacon, Brad Flickinger, Byron Isaacs, and John Simon. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Massachusets, through August 15.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Cecil MacKinnon, assisted by Christine Adaire. Choreography by Susan Dibble. Set design by Jim Youngerman. Costumes by Arthur Oliver. Lighting by Michael Giannitti. Music composed by Harold Meltzer. Sound design by Meltzer and Mark Huang. With Johnny Lee Davenport, Ted Hewlett, Andrew Borthwick-Leslie, Allyn Burrows, Manu Narayan, Gerry Bamman, Dan McCleary, Antonia Freeland, Jack Marsh, Dylan Wittrock, Reilly Hadden, Judith McSpadden, Sheila Bandyopadhyay, Christine Calfas, Dennis Krausnick, Tod Randolph, Celia Madeoy, Carolyn Roberts Berry, Corinna May, Walter Campbell, Elizabeth Ingram, Peter Wittrock, and Josef Pfitzer. Presented by Shakespeare & Company at the Mount, Lenox, Massachusets, through August 29.

Gwyneth Paltrow in 'As You Like It'

Talk about a movie-star entrance. A trapdoor in the stage floor flips open and up sweeps Gwyneth Paltrow, ravishing in a strapless red formal, a turquoise-gowned, equally towheaded Megan Dodds trailing behind her like some deputy goddess. At least Paltrow, who is starring as Rosalind in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's stylish staging of Shakespeare's As You Like It, left the bodyguards who reportedly shadow her about the Western Massachusetts college town in the wings.

But Paltrow is no Hollywood carpetbagger in Williamstown. She's more a summer-folk version of Matt Damon in Cambridge, having grown up on the verdant sidelines of the theater festival where mother Blythe Danner was a frequent player. It was apparently Paltrow's early-'90s WTF performance in Picnic (with Danner and Jane Krakowski) that persuaded producer dad Bruce Paltrow to let her quit college and try her hand at the thespian thing. She also, in her pre-fame days, played Nina in The Seagull there, with Danner as Arkadina.

So this is not some photogenic film star lacking stage chops. And Paltrow's performance as Rosalind is charming: graceful, fervent, and just a little goofy. Moreover, the production -- which also features Perfect Strangers star (and American Repertory Theatre alum) Mark Linn-Baker as Touchstone, LA Law regular Michael Cumpsty as Jaques, Obie-winning Lesbian Brother Lea DeLaria as Audrey, and Tony-nominated Porgy and Bess star Larry Marshall crooning "It's a Wonderful World" in the unlikely guise of old Adam -- is not one of those big-name outings that seems to have no ideas beyond its casting. Director Barry Edelstein has stocked Shakespeare's Forest of Arden with eclectic but eminently droll delights, including a jazz quartet to smoke up Mark Bennett's arrestingly dissonant settings of the Bard's ditties.

Of course Edelstein, the artistic director of New York's Classic Stage Company, comes armed with one of Shakespeare's most exquisite comedies. And if this summer production does not plumb the philosophic depths of As You Like It, with its poetic ruminations on corrupt civilization and harsh yet redemptive nature, it ably stirs its frothy comedy without allowing it to foam over the top. Even the show's broadest elements -- for example, DeLaria's Flintstone-esque Audrey, scat-singing to "It was a lover and his lass" -- temper silliness with sophistication.

Narelle Sissons's sets are spare and whimsical, with floating Chagall-like touches. Anita Yavich's costumes, which stretch from Edwardiana to the '50s (with nods back and forward), provide both a palette of bold, contrasting colors and amusing bases for the characters (and, for once, Rosalind does seem transformed, moving from that exquisite gown -- better than the one Paltrow wore to the Oscars -- to a knickered schoolboy suit and tress-hiding cap). Throughout the production, both design and staging supply saucy twists on the Bard, from Orlando's initial appearance in bad brother Oliver's orchard, catching falling apples in a crate as he bemoans his lot, to the beaming appearance of Marshall's Adam in white tails to preside over the play's happy ending as if it were the stuff of an MGM musical. And the jazzy bits are nicely tootled and sung, especially by Keith Byron Kirk as that headliner of Arden, exiled Duke Senior's lord Amiens.

The gorgeously gangly Paltrow already proved herself adept at the Shakespearean staple of cross-dressing in Shakespeare in Love. Here her feisty ward of the court, engaging with cousin Celia in self-conscious games of vampery, sighing giddily for Orlando, holding her own against Duke Frederick, gives way to a kibitzing tomboy of the forest who can't quite believe she's getting away with her masculine act, yet keeps taking the audacious improvisation further. And Dodds's savvy, gutsy Celia proves an adept foil -- she can't believe what Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, gets up to either.

As for film-star hopeful Alessandro Nivola (he's in both the upcoming Love's Labour's Lost and Mansfield Park movies), who has the unenviable task of playing Orlando to Paltrow's Rosalind, he's well-spoken but almost deliberately bland -- and blandly costumed as well. Still, his Orlando does exhibit a sort of perpetual, curious bewitchment in Rosalind's presence, even when he doesn't know she's she. And there is a lovely moment in the wrestling scene (it's arm wrestling) when Rosalind seems to impart strength to Orlando as if by magic, causing him suddenly to turn David against Mark K. Smaltz's strutting, zoot-suited Goliath. (The attraction between R&O, a program synopsis tells us, is "instantaneous and profound." Indeed, love at first sight, arbitrary yet binding, is a motif of the production.)

Linn-Baker, in baggy-pants motley and sneakers, is a silent-film comic of a Touchstone who wags his way through the forest, sprints his way through the fifth-act "quarrel on the seventh cause" speech, and proves to have no way whatever with the cutely corraled stuffed sheep who are part and parcel of the shepherd's life in this production. As his bucolic foil, Tom Bloom is a sage, laconic Corin. And DeLaria is very funny as the cheerful, combative Audrey, wearing clogs, skins, and a dazed grin. Among the other rusticals, John Ellison Conlee is a sweetly suffering Stanley Kowalski of a Silvius, Angelina Phillips a Bronx vixen of a Phebe.

Byron Jennings, a dour Duke Frederick, is an almost daffily optimistic Duke Senior, enthusiastically lauding life away from "painted pomp" to the Robert Blyish whoops of his forest followers. But he can grow commanding, even admonishing, when occasion calls -- as when he reminds Jaques, out to "Cleanse the foul body of the infected world," of his former libertinism. And Michael Cumpsty is an unusually plummy Jaques, a muscular "Monsieur Melancholy" with Noël Coward dash and the audacity to launch into "All the world's a stage" from a supine position on the floor. Like him, the production stints on underlying sadness at life's cruelty. But it exudes a stylishness from which you can suck pleasure, as Jaques memorably puts it, "as a weasel sucks eggs."

There is musical acknowledgment in As You Like It of "winter and rough weather." But down the road at Shakespeare & Company, on the night I attended the outdoor main-stage production of Love's Labour's Lost, the performers weren't waxing about the elements, they were contending with them. This Shakespearean outing lacks some of the advantages of Williamstown's -- and I don't mean Paltrow, bewitching and refreshing though she may be. I refer, rather, to As You Like It itself, a far more worthy and seasoned comedy than the early Love's Labour's, and to a roof. The performance I witnessed took place, for at least the first act, in a pelting rain. But if the audience and a lot of the Bard's arch jokes were all wet, the performance proved undrownable. Indeed, its robust pageant sparkled like a driplet in the moonlight.

As daunting as the rain, though, was the play itself. An account of what happens when four guys quixotically renounce women and the world for a rigorously contemplative life, then immediately regret it when a quartet of pretty ladies shows up, Love's Labour's is not the Bard's best. Unlike the highly physical early comedies, among them The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's depends on wit and wordplay, much of which has grown tedious and arcane with the lapse of some 405 years. Even the play's most successful elements -- the banter between jousting lovers Berowne and Rosaline, for example -- seem like pale, presaging echoes of later, better works. Still, there is "the sweet smoke of rhetoric" in Berowne's wry quips, railings against "Dan Cupid," and later, passionate apostrophes to romantic love and ladies' eyes. And the character of "fantastical Spaniard" (and flowery Malaprop) Don Armado, played here with both vulnerability and panache by the talented Dan McCleary, makes some amusing leaps across the language barrier.

The company as a whole makes a winning case for the play -- though, soaked as I was, I tended to lose patience with the verbal sparring of Armado and his page Moth (such inexplicable routines as "The fox, the ape, and the humblebee"), not to mention with the academic-gasbagging drolleries of schoolmaster Holofernes (here a schoolmistress, in the padded Victorian person of Elizabeth Ingram) and curate Sir Nathaniel. And the scene in which the play's quartet of smitten men, having thrown in the monkish towel, court their lady loves in the guise of mad Russians is pretty ridiculous -- though it's given full, idiotic rein here, complete with silly accents and crazy folk dances.

Certainly Love's Labour's Lost is well suited to Shakespeare & Company's wooded glen. A lot of it is set in the King of Navarre's park, since the oath taken by the royal and his love-shunning lords forbids their inviting the Princess of France, who's visiting on business, and her trio of attendants into the house. Moreover, director Cecil MacKinnon situates Navarre on a river, so that the Princess's approach is heralded by a majestic white sail gliding behind the playing space. MacKinnon describes the play as "a festival" and peoples it thus, with rusticating lords and ladies literally swinging through the trees, and a quintet of black-clad, hornbook-wielding Elizabethan schoolboys who, like their contemporary counterparts, snicker and hoot at anything that might be conceived as a double entendre.

Except for the mentally nimble, loophole-seeking Berowne, the play's lovers are not very sharply distinguished. It helps, then, to have an actor of the stature of Johnny Lee Davenport, who makes the King authoritative yet personable. As mock master Berowne, impish Allyn Burrows ably juggles irony and feeling. And he is matched by Corinna May's sly, knowing Rosaline. Tod Randolph's Princess of France turns on a dime from the flirtatious festivities of the idyll at Navarre to the pained maturity of the play's ending, when the death of the Princess's father intervenes and the ladies must put their impetuous swains to a harder test than the self-administered one they've already flunked.

Ted Hewlett and Andrew Borthwick-Leslie are the interchangeably callow Longaville and Dumaine; Carolyn Roberts Berry is a graceful Katharine and Celia Madeoy a bumptious Maria. Christine Calfas is deliciously ripe and uncomprehending as the wench Jacquenetta, who's loved by Don Armado and dallied with by the clown Costard, the latter aptly portrayed as a sort of naughty Ed Norton by Ibsen adapter, Hartford Stage veteran, and S&C newcomer Gerry Bamman. If Love's Labour's Lost is itself somewhat labored, this production not only mines its charms, it proves them waterproof.