Tag Archives: Delacorte Theater

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK

Kenny Leon moves Much Ado About Nothing to modern-day Atlanta in Shakespeare in the Park adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Tuesday – Sunday through June 22, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

Danielle Brooks gives a powerhouse comedic performance as Beatrice in Kenny Leon’s jaunty, rollicking adaptation of William Shakespeare’s ever-charming romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing, which opened Tuesday night at the Public’s open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where it continues through June 22. Leon has moved the proceedings to modern-day Atlanta, complete with cell phones, contemporary music, and an impressive car that pulls up at the back of Beowulf Boritt’s welcoming set — the large, grassy courtyard and four-story estate belonging to Gov. Leonato (Chuck Cooper), boasting a pair of red, white, and blue political banners declaring, “Abrams 2020,” referring to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (who recently was in the audience). The show opens with Beatrice singing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” soon joined by Leonato’s daughter, Hero (Margaret Odette), and her ladies-in-waiting, Ursula (Tiffany Denise Hobbs) and Margaret (Olivia Washington), singing “America the Beautiful,” a stark contrast highlighting the polarized state of our nation as the songs overlap. Following a brief protest march with signs condemning hate, the dapper Don Pedro (Billy Eugene Jones) arrives with his contingent after a military victory, including his close friend Count Claudio (Jeremie Harris), his guitar-strumming attendant, Balthasar (Daniel Croix Henderson), and the don’s brother, the bastard Don John (Hubert Point-Du Jour).

Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) gossips with her besties in Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park (photo by Joan Marcus)

Claudio immediately falls for Hero while Beatrice, Leonato’s niece, and Benedick (Grantham Coleman), a lord who fought alongside Don Pedro, throw sharp barbs at each other, neither in the market for a spouse. (The first time Beatrice says his name, she emphasizes the last syllable.) But Don John, who is no Don Juan, has decided that since he is miserable, no one else is to be happy, so he calls upon his henchmen, Borachio (Jaime Lincoln Smith) and Conrade (Khiry Walker), to stir up trouble and cast would-be lovers against one another. “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace,” Don Pedro says. “Though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.” Mistaken identity, misunderstandings, a masquerade ball, spying, lying, and private letters all come into play in one of the Bard’s most beloved comedies.

Tony nominee Brooks (The Color Purple, Orange Is the New Black) is phenomenal as Beatrice, taking full advantage of her size, her vocal talents, and her expert timing. She moves and grooves across the stage, reciting her lines with an easygoing, conversational flow and rhythm, an innate sense of humor, and a magical command of the language that breathes new life into the Bard’s words. “I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his killing,” she proclaims early on. It’s all Coleman (Buzzer) can do to not get swept up in the hurricane that is Brooks; on the rainy night I went, he even took a hard spill on the wet ground, wiping out on his back but getting up quickly, able to joke about the nasty fall. (It reminded me of a special moment I saw in the previous Shakespeare in the Park production of the play five years ago, when John Glover, as Leonato, pulled off an unforgettable, far less dangerous maneuver after a storm.)

Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) and Benedick (Grantham Coleman) explore a love-hate relationship in Bard romantic comedy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner and longtime Atlanta resident Leon (American Son, A Raisin in the Sun) has the women take charge in this version, the men relegated to the back seat in the all-person-of-color cast. He even has a woman, Lateefah Holder, portray Constable Dogberry, although her shtick becomes too repetitive (but is very funny at first). Among the males, the always dependable Cooper (Choir Boy, The Piano Lesson) stands out, steady and forthright, while Odette (The Convent, Sign Me) is a sweetly innocent Hero. The fresh choreography is by Camille A. Brown, with snappy costumes by Emilio Sosa and original music by Jason Michael Webb. But at the center of it all is Brooks, who is in full command as a Beatrice for the ages.

(In addition to waiting on line at the Delacorte and the Public to get free tickets, you can also enter the daily virtual ticketing lottery online here. The play is almost never canceled because of bad weather, so going on a rainy day is a great idea, as a lot of seats become available due to no-shows.)

THE GOSPEL AT COLONUS

More than forty singers will turn the Delacorte into a Pentecostal church in Gospel at Colonus (photo by Melissa Gaul)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
September 4-9, free, 8:00
publictheater.org

Since 2013, the annual Shakespeare in the Park summer festival has concluded with a musical version of a classic tale, performed over Labor Day weekend following the two main productions. Adapted by either Todd Almond (The Tempest, The Odyssey) or Shaina Taub (The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It with Laurie Woolery) and under the leadership of Public Works founder and director Lear deBessonet, the shows feature top-tier actors (Laura Benanti, Christopher Fitzgerald, Lindsay Mendez, Brandon Victor Dixon, Norm Lewis) joined by some two hundred men, women, and children from community organizations across all five boroughs. This year, however, a previous Public Works production, Taub’s Twelfth Night, was brought back for a full run, so the Labor Day weekend spot is being filled by a revival of The Gospel at Colonus, a copresentation of the Public Theater and the Onassis Foundation USA playing September 4-9 at the Delacorte. The retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, which takes place in between Oedipus Rex and Antigone, has been transported to a black Pentecostal church; the book and lyrics are by Mabou Mines founding coartistic director Lee Breuer, with a gospel score by Bob Telson. The show premiered in 1983 at BAM and went on to win an Obie for Best Musical; it was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and earned Breuer a Tony nomination for Best Book. The exciting cast features the Blind Boys of Alabama as Oedipus, Rev. Dr. Earl F. Miller as the Messenger, the Legendary Soul Stirrers (Willie Rogers, Ben Odom, and Gene Stewart) as Choragos, Wren T. Brown as Theseus, Greta Oglesby as Antigone, Shari Addison as Ismene, Jay Caldwell as Creon, Kevin Davis as Polyneices, and J. D. Steele as the choir director, with Tina Fabrique, Jeff Young, Sam Butler Jr., Carolyn Johnson-White, and Josie Johnson in other key singing roles. Musical numbers include “Live Where You Can,” “Evil Kindness,” and “Stop; Do Not Go On!”

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: TWELFTH NIGHT

Sir Toby Belch (Shuler Hensley) and Feste (Shaina Taub) argue over who is the worst in Twelfth Night at the Delacorte (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Tuesday-Sunday through August 19, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

“Shall we set about some revels?” Sir Toby Belch asks in Twelfth Night. “I do delight in masques and revels, sometimes altogether,” responds Sir Andrew Aguecheek. There is much to revel in at the Public Works presentation of William Shakespeare’s 1601-2 comic romance, continuing at the Public Theater’s Delacorte through August 19. Since 2013, the annual Shakespeare in the Park summer festival has concluded with a musical version of a classic tale, performed over Labor Day weekend following the two main productions. Adapted by either Todd Almond (The Tempest, The Odyssey) or Shaina Taub (The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It with Laurie Woolery) and under the leadership of Public Works founder and director Lear deBessonet, the shows feature top-tier actors (Laura Benanti, Christopher Fitzgerald, Lindsay Mendez, Brandon Victor Dixon, Norm Lewis) joined by some two hundred men, women, and children from community organizations across all five boroughs. In 2016, Taub staged Twelfth Night, which is now back for an ecstatic full run in Central Park, spreading Joe Papp’s belief that theater is for all people. This production is totally committed to that vision; before the show starts, the entire audience is encouraged to hang out onstage and interact with members of the enormous cast and crew, playing checkers and other games, sitting for caricature sketches, eating free popcorn, singing with a small band, and posing for pictures in front of the set. (Yes, that man handing out glow sticks is Shuler Hensley, the Tony-winning star of Young Frankenstein, Les Misérables, and Oklahoma!)

Viola (Nikki M. James) and Duke Orsino (Ato Blankson-Wood) are desperate for love in musical adaptation of Shakespeare play (photo by Joan Marcus)

The ninety-minute show is a pure delight. After a shipwreck in which she believes her twin brother, Sebastian (Troy Anthony), must have been killed, Viola (Tony winner Nikki M. James) winds up in Illyria, where the grief-stricken Countess Olivia (Nanya-Akuki Goodrich) is mourning the loss of her own brother. Disguising herself as a man named Cesario, Viola gets a job working for the lovesick Duke Orsino (Ato Blankson-Wood), who has the hots for Olivia, but she wants no part of him. In fact, Olivia is attracted to Cesario, while Viola has fallen for Orsino. The absurdly proper steward Malvolio (Andrew Kober) is also in love with his ladyship, Olivia. Through it all, Olivia’s uncle, the drunken wastrel Sir Toby Belch (Hensley), and his bestie, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Daniel Hall), flit about Illyria, getting drunk, making jokes, and causing trouble, including teaming up with Olivia’s gentlewoman, Maria (Lori Brown-Niang), to pull off a rather mean-spirited prank. As Sebastian and his friend, Antonio (Jonathan Jordan), enter Illyria, the mistaken identity, screwball love triangles, and general mayhem ratchet way up.

Malvolio (Andrew Kober) brings down the house with some vaudevillian shtick in Public Works presentation in Central Park (photo by Joan Marcus)

In addition to writing the music and lyrics for the show, which she conceived with Kwame Kwei-Armah (the new artistic director of the Young Vic), the Vermont-raised, New York City–based Taub (Old Hats; Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) introduces it, portrays Feste the fool, and leads the band at her piano. She’s sort of like a sprite, prancing about with her accordion; even when she accidentally tripped, she declared her instrument fine and continued the scene in excellent form, wearing a huge smile. The songs not only propel the plot and deepen character development but also relate wonderfully to Shakespeare’s language; the opening number is “Play On” (“If music be the food of love, play on!”), and Kober has a blast chewing up the showstoppers “Count Malvolio” (“I could be Count Malvolio! / Lord of the estate / Dressed in all the finest silk and master of my fate / I’d summon all my minions in a most majestic tone / Then once they all arrived / I’d tell them, ‘Leave me alone!’”) and “Greatness” (“If some are born great / And some achieve greatness / And some have greatness thrust upon them / Then I can’t help that I was born great! / I didn’t ask to be the best / Things would be much easier being average like the rest”). Feste kicks off “You’re the Worst,” in which Fabian (Patrick J. O’Hare), Sir Andrew, Sir Toby, and Feste roast one another (“You try too sincerely to please every crowd / You play the accordion, for crying out loud! / So let me tell you first / That you are the worst!”) before ganging up on poor Malvolio. The score also features “If You Were My Beloved,” “Is This Not Love?” and “Word on the Street,” as Taub and her band go from New Orleans jazz and pop to R&B and hip-hop.

The audience is encouraged to (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The audience is encouraged to mingle with cast and crew and play onstage before show (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

For Twelfth Night, the Public has partnered with Brownsville Recreation Center, Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education, Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, DreamYard Project, Fortune Society, Military Resilience Project, Children’s Aid Society, and Domestic Workers United, with cameos from people from COBU, Jambalaya Brass Band, the Love Show, New York Deaf Theatre, Ziranmen Kungfu Wushu Training Center, and even the US Post Office. Every participant, regardless of theatrical experience, is given equal billing both on the official poster and in the Playbill. Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis has taken the helm from Kwei-Armah, directing the rather large cast on Rachel Hauck’s welcoming, carnivalesque set, which is backed by the facade of Olivia and Orsino’s homes. Eustis and choreographer Lorin Latarro do a superb job, avoiding having everyone just run into each other everywhere, keeping the narrative flowing as more and more folks enter and leave. Andrea Hood has a field day with the costumes, ranging from Elizabethan dress to modern-day summer wear; at one early point the night I went, when Sebastian and Antonio approach the edge of the stage, nearly in the audience, a man and woman in blue nurse’s clothes slowly got up right in front of them and started pushing a man on an extended gurney-like contraption to the right. I closely watched their path, expecting them to go up the ramp and onto the stage, but it turned out that it must have been a real emergency as they headed out of the Delacorte with their patient. It was an unexpected turn of events, but it also proved how unpredictable this production is, where anything can happen. As Fabian says, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: OTHELLO

Iago (Corey Stoll) has a point to make with Othello (Chukwudi Iwuji) in Othello at the Delacorte (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Tuesday-Sunday through June 24, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

While filming Richard Eyre’s 2018 BBC television adaptation of King Lear, Chukwudi Iwuji, who was playing the king of France, was told by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was starring in the title role, “You must be ready for your Othello now.” Iwuji proves he is more than ready in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s gripping, emotional production that opened last night at the Delacorte in Central Park as part of the Public Theater’s annual Shakespeare in the Park presentation. Born and raised in Nigeria, later educated in Ethiopia and England, and now living in New York City, Iwuji, a Royal Shakespeare Company associate artist, has built up quite a resume at the Public, portraying the narrator and Enobarbus in Anthony and Cleopatra at the Anspacher in 2014, as Edgar in King Lear at the Delacorte that same year with John Lithgow as the monarch, taking the lead in Hamlet in the Public Theater’s Mobile Unit abbreviated 2016 version, and being nominated for awards as slave John Blanke in Bruce Norris’s The Low Road at the Anspacher earlier this year. (He also played the duke of Buckingham in Richard III at BAM in 2012.) In a role previously played at the Delacorte by James Earl Jones in 1964 and Raul Julia in 1979 and 1991, Iwuji might be shorter in stature and more naturally handsome than most actors who portray Othello, but he commands the role from the very moment he appears onstage, displaying a regal charm and joie de vivre even as he is instantly hustled by his devious ensign, Iago, played here by the tall, thin, bald Corey Stoll with a sarcastic and cynical sense of humor that is often laugh-out-loud funny.

Desdemona (Heather Lind) and Emilia (Alison Wright) help the women take charge in Othello in Central Park (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony-winning actor and director Santiago-Hudson (Jitney, Paradise Blue) keeps the focus on romance, particularly the deep, passionate love between Othello and Desdemona (Heather Lind), who have just gotten married against the wishes of her father, senator Brabantio (Miguel Perez), contrasting sharply with the much colder relationship between Iago and his wife, Emilia (Alison Wright). A Venetian military hero fighting the Turks, Othello has complete trust in Iago, who is out to destroy him, using and abusing his right-hand man, Roderigo (Motell Foster), in the process. Iago’s plan involves driving Othello into a jealous rage by convincing him that Desdemona is being unfaithful with Othello’s loyal lieutenant, Cassio (Babak Tafti), whose girlfriend, Bianca (Flor De Liz Perez), is no mere prostitute. In Santiago-Hudson’s vision, Desdemona, Bianca, and Emilia are strong female characters who are quick to stand up for themselves. Wright brings the house down in a late, fiery speech that gets to the heart of the truth. The excellent ensemble also includes Peter Jay Fernandez as the duke of Venice, Andrew Hovelson as Lodovico, Thomas Schall as Montano, and Peter Van Wagner as Gratiano, the cast moving through Rachel Hauck’s relatively basic but effective set, two walls with gothic archways, with a small tower on either side. Toni-Leslie James’s period costumes have a punk edge, consisting of lots of black leather and cool accessories on the men and lush gowns on the women.

Othello (Chukwudi Iwuji) holds on tight to Desdemona (Heather Lind) as Emilia (Alison Wright) looks on in Rubin Santiago-Hudson’s stirring period version of classic Shakespeare play (photo by Joan Marcus)

“Rude am I in my speech / And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace,” Othello says early on, but in actuality Iwuji speaks Shakespeare’s words with such poetic beauty and skill that it evokes the sound of the birds singing in the trees as night falls. Iwuji and Lind (The Merchant of Venice, Incognito) are electric together; at one point Othello lifts his arm out to her and it is magical. Meanwhile Stoll (Intimate Apparel, Plenty), in his third consecutive year doing Shakespeare in the Park (following Troilus and Cressida and Julius Caesar), and Emmy nominee Wright (The Americans, Sneaky Pete) are also a dynamic pair as their characters’ marriage heads toward a giant abyss of lies. Of course, even with the concentration on romance and the emergent power of the women, as well as the undercurrent of racism that is always simmering, the success of the play ultimately relies on the chemistry between the actors playing Othello and Iago, who have previously been portrayed by such mixed-race pairs as David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor, Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh, Paul Robeson and José Ferrer, Jones and Christopher Plummer, and Julia and Christopher Walken. “O grace! O heaven forgive me! / O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world: / To be direct and honest is not safe,” the conniving Iago says. “Nay, stay. Thou shouldst be honest,” the too-easily-convinced Othello replies. Iwuji and Stoll have now become part of the canon, and they well earn their place in this stirring, elegant production.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Annaleigh Ashford steals the show as Helena in Shakespeare in the Park presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Tuesday-Sunday through August 13, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

Since 2013, Public Works founder and resident director Lear deBessonet has presented special short-run summer productions of classic works at the Delacorte Theater consisting of professional and nonprofessional actors, with casts of more than two hundred men, women, and children, from community organizations from all five boroughs in addition to theater veterans. The Public Theater initiative has included musical adaptations of The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, and The Odyssey. DeBessonet also directed Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan indoors at the Public’s Martinson Hall. But now the thirty-something Baton Rouge native and longtime Brooklynite is moving to one of the Public Theatre’s largest and best-loved programs, making her Shakespeare in the Park directorial debut. She’s helming the Bard’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which would appear to be a terrific vehicle for her sensibilities but which turns out to be a mixed bag, though still fun. The romantic comedy is one of Shakespeare’s most delightful and well-structured plays, with four intersecting plots dealing with the notion of love in all its forms. Theseus, the Duke of Athens (Bhavesh Patel), is preparing to wed Hippolyta, queen of the Amazon (De’Adre Aziza). Hermia (Shalita Grant) is in love with Lysander (Kyle Beltran), but her father, Egeus (David Manis), insists that she marry Demetrius (Alex Hernandez) or face severe punishment. Helena (Annaleigh Ashford) is madly in love with Demetrius, who has no interest in her. Meanwhile, an acting troupe of artisans known as the Mechanicals — carpenter Peter Quince (Robert Joy), weaver Nick Bottom (Danny Burstein), bellows mender Francis Flute (Jeff Hiller), tinker Snout (Patrena Murray), joiner Snug (Austin Durant), and tailor Robin Starveling (Joe Tapper) — have come to Athens to put on a production of Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe, about a pair of Babylonian lovers, a wall, and a lion, but professionalism is not their forte. And deep in the forest are the Fairies, including King Oberon (Richard Poe) and Queen Titania (Phylicia Rashad), who are battling over a changeling boy (Benjamin Ye), along with Robin Goodfellow, better known as Puck (Kristine Nielsen), Peaseblossom (Vinie Burrows), Cobweb (Manis), and Mustardseed (Warren Wyss). Magical elixirs, mistaken identity, and animal transformation ensue. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” Lysander tells Hermia. And Puck declares, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Titania (Phylicia Rashad) finds a strange bedfellow in Nick Bottom (Danny Burstein) in Bard show at the Delacorte (photo by Joan Marcus)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream practically demands to be performed outside, and the Delacorte is a splendid home for it. Tony winner David Rockwell’s (She Loves Me) fairy-tale set features three lush green trees, a movable stone wall entranceway, a tree house where the band plays, and a playground slide amid the clouds, stars, flying insects, and backstage raccoons. The fab costumes, including a glamorous shout-out to Beyoncé, are by Tony winner Clint Ramos (Eclipsed). Tony winner Ashford (Kinky Boots, You Can’t Take It with You) steals the show as Helena, once again displaying her spectacular aptitude for physical comedy; her line deliveries, facial expressions, and wacky movements make the production worthwhile all on their own. Six-time Tony nominee Burstein (Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret) has a ball as Bottom, who is turned into a donkey, although the play-within-a-play drags on a bit too long. Casting senior citizens as the fairies, dressed in white night clothing, is cute at first but eventually slows things down, and not even the always outstanding Nielsen can turn it around. And there’s usually sexual tension surrounding the changeling, but deBessonet has made him a young boy searching for a home. Marcelle Davies-Lashley belts out some hot New Orleans–tinged R&B as a fairy singer in a glitzy gown, but her appearances are disruptive to the narrative, taking the audience out of Shakespeare’s fantasy world. (The band consists of music director Jon Spurney on keyboards and guitar, Jeremy Chatzky on bass, Christian Cassan on drums and percussion, Andrew Gutauskas on reeds, Freddy Hall on guitar, and Matt Owens on trumpet and flugabone.) Despite the production’s disjointedness, there is nary a better way to spend a night outdoors in New York City, especially for free. As Puck relates, “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear.”

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

midsummer nights dream delacorte

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
July 11 – August 13, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

The Public Theater follows up its controversial staging of Julius Caesar, in which the title character was modeled directly on President Donald Trump, with its fourth presentation of the Bard’s enchanting fairy tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. James Lapine directed the 1982 edition, starring Christine Baranski, Ricky Jay, Deborah Rush, Kevin Conroy, and William Hurt; Cacá Rosset played Bottom and helmed the carnivalesque 1991 version from Brazil’s Teatro do Ornitorrinco; and in 2006, Daniel Sullivan directed Martha Plimpton, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Mireille Enos, Keith David, Tim Blake Nelson, George Morfogen, and Jay O. Sanders. Now Obie winner Lear deBessonet (Venus, Good Person of Szechwan), who directed the Public Works adaptations of The Winter’s Tale in 2014 and The Odyssey in 2015 at the Delacorte, has assembled a stellar cast for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, running from July 11 to August 13. The roster includes Tony winner Annaleigh Ashford as Helena, six-time Tony nominee Danny Burstein as Nick Bottom, Tony winner Phylicia Rashad as Titania, Kyle Beltran as Lysander, De’Adre Aziza as Hippolyta, Bhavesh Patel as Theseus, Shalita Grant as Hermia, Robert Joy as Peter Quince, Patrena Murray as Snout, Richard Poe as Oberon, and two-time Obie winner and Tony nominee Kristine Nielsen as Puck. The scenic design is by Tony winner David Rockwell, with costumes by Tony winner Clint Ramos, choreography by Chase Brock, and original music by Justin Levine. There are several ways to get the much-coveted free tickets: going to Central Park and waiting on line at the Delacorte for distribution at 12 noon; signing up for the lottery at the Public Theater at 11:00 am; picking up a voucher at a specific daily location in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island for a noon distribution; or trying the email and digital TodayTix lotteries. Good luck — as Lysander tells Hermia, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

Pandarus (John Glover) brings together Troilus (Andrew Burnap) and Cressida (Ismenia Mendes) in new Shakespeare in the Park production (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Through August 14, free, 8:00
publictheater.org

For the third time in the fifty-six-year history of Shakespeare in the Park, the Public Theater is taking on the seldom-performed, less-than-popular Troilus and Cressida at the Delacorte. One of William Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays, the work has fairly obvious issues, including convoluted story lines, subplots that never get resolved or have bleak conclusions, and a narrative that uneasily shifts between comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. In 1965, Public Theater founder Joseph Papp directed a production starring Richard Jordan as Troilus, Flora Elkins as Cressida, and James Earl Jones as Ajax, and thirty years later Mark Wing-Davey helmed a version with Neal Huff as Troilus, Stephen Spinella as Pandarus and Calchas, Elizabeth Marvel as Cressida, Catherine Kellner as Cassandra, and Tim Blake Nelson as Thersites. Shakespeare director extraordinaire Daniel Sullivan is firmly in charge of this latest adaptation, set in modern times, complete with contemporary military weapons and clothing, pounding music by Dan Moses Schreier, and blazing strobe lights by Robert Wierzel. David Zinn’s stark red set features a movable wall of doors in the back, small caged rooms at either side, and detritus composed of old chairs and other items at front stage left and right. (Zinn also designed the cool costumes.) The great John Glover begins and ends the play as Pandarus, the hobbled uncle of the lovely Cressida (Ismenia Mendes), daughter of Trojan priest Calchas (Miguel Perez), who has defected to the Greeks. Pandarus serves as a kind of matchmaker for his niece, who is coveted by Troilus (Andrew Burnap), son of Priam (Perez), king of Troy. (Yes, the word “pander” came from the character Pandarus.) Troilus and Cressida seal their true love with a night of passion, but the next day she discovers that she is to be sent to the Greeks, and back to her traitorous father, in exchange for a Trojan captive, Antenor (Sanjit De Silva). At the Greek camp she is wooed by Diomedes (Zach Appelman) while trying to remain faithful to her beloved Troilus. Meanwhile, after seven years of the Trojan War, both sides seek one-on-one combat, with first dimwitted warrior Ajax (Alex Breaux) and then hunky fighter Achilles (Louis Cancelmi), who has a thing for the effeminate Patroclus (Tom Pecinka), taking on one of Troilus’s brothers, the brave and true Hector (Bill Heck). Watching over it all are the leaders of the Greeks, general Agamemnon (John Douglas Thompson), elderly mentor Nestor (Edward James Hyland), the cuckolded Menelaus, Agamemenon’s brother (Forrest Malloy), and sly, clever adviser Ulysses (Corey Stoll). Lust, jealousy, pride, and power drive the mishmash story to its violent finale.

Ulysses (Corey Stoll) tries to explain things to the none-too-bright Ajax (Alex Breaux) in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA at the Delacorte (photo by Joan Marcus)

Inspired by Chaucer’s poem “Troilus and Criseyde” and Homer’s The Iliad, Shakespeare’s play, which scholars believe was a late, unpaginated addition to the first folio, is all over the place, unable to find a central focus. But six-time Tony nominee (and one-time winner) Sullivan (The Merchant of Venice, Proof) manages to keep a precarious balance among the kitchen-sink events while also making it relevant to today’s ongoing wars in the Middle East, helped by fine performances by Burnap, who just graduated from the Yale School of Drama; Mendes (The Wayside Motor Inn, Family Furniture), who plays Cressida with a tentative, nuanced charm; Breaux (Red Speedo, Much Ado About Nothing), who brings a humorous doofiness to Ajax; Max Casella (The Lion King, Timon of Athens), who relishes his role as Thersites, the nasty fool, who declares, “The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance”; Heck (The Merchant of Venice, Night Is a Room) as the honorable warrior Hector; and most especially Delacorte veteran, five-time Emmy nominee, and Tony winner Glover (Much Ado About Nothing, Love! Valour! Compassion!) as Pandarus, who immediately has the audience eating out of the palms of his very able hands. Troilus and Cressida might not be one of Shakespeare’s best works, but Sullivan and his excellent cast have turned it into a very welcome and entertaining production, despite its many flaws.