Andre Braugher’s dual performance as dueling dukes is one of the highlights of AS YOU LIKE IT (photo by Joan Marcus)
Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Through June 30 (no show June 24), free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org
Fifty years ago this week, the Delacorte Theater in Central Park opened with a production of The Merchant of Venice directed by Joe Papp and Gladys Vaughan and starring George C. Scott as Shylock, followed by The Tempest, with Paul Stevens as Prospero and James Earl Jones as Caliban, directed by Gerald Freedman. Since that time, Shakespeare in the Park has been home to more than 150 shows with all-star casts that have been seen by more than five million people. The Delacorte’s golden anniversary season began June 5 with the Bard’s mistaken-identity romantic comedy As You Like It, directed by Public Theater veteran Daniel Sullivan. The story has been shifted to the antebellum South of the 1840s, where Duke Frederick (an excellent Andre Braugher) has been running rampant, exiling people he feels are not loyal to him and threaten his rule, including his older brother, Duke Senior (a fine Braugher again), Senior’s daughter, Rosalind (Lily Rabe), and Orlando (David Furr), a local man who has been mistreated by his older brother, Oliver (Omar Metwally), and had the audacity to beat Frederick’s champion wrestler (Brendan Averett). Disguised as a boy named Ganymede, Rosalind decides to seek out her father in the Forest of Arden, joined on the dangerous journey by her best friend, Celia (Renee Elise Goldsberry), Frederick’s daughter, and Touchstone (Oliver Platt), the court fool. Meanwhile, Orlando is determined to find Rosalind and declare his undying love for her. Sullivan has transformed the eminently likable As You Like It into a somewhat old-fashioned piece of Americana, complete with a four-piece folk-bluegrass band led by banjo favorite Tony Trischka playing songs written by Steve Martin. The first half is indeed very funny and engaging, highlighted by the foot-stomping music and John Lee Beatty’s set, a tall wooden fort that opens up into the dense green Forest of Arden, incorporating Central Park’s real trees. Sullivan adds small touches outside of the script, little flourishes of eye contact and physical shtick that bring playful life to the familiar tale.
Stephen Spinella declares that “all the world’s a stage” in uneven Central Park production (photo by Joan Marcus)
But after intermission, things devolve quickly, as Rabe’s Rosalind turns annoying and obnoxious, Furr’s Orlando becomes silly and overwrought, and the side-plot relationships between Touchstone and busty local lass Audrey (Donna Lynne Champlin) and young Silvius (Will Rogers) and Phoebe (Susannah Flood) seem superfluous at best. Even the music starts feeling repetitive and unnecessary. In the play’s most famous speech, clumsily delivered by an otherwise solid Stephen Spinella as Jaques, Senior’s cynical attendant goes through the seven stages of man, explaining, “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players. . . . Last scene of all / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” He could just as well be describing the interminable second act of this well-meaning but ultimately disappointing production. As You Like It runs through June 30, followed July 23 – August 25 by Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, starring Amy Adams, Donna Murphy, Denis O’Hare, and Gideon Glick. Don’t forget that in addition to waiting on line at the Delacorte to get free tickets, you can also enter the daily virtual ticketing lottery online here.