Tag Archives: Jacob Ming-Trent

THE HARDER THEY COME

Ivan (Natey Jones, far left) arrives in the city seeking fame and fortune in The Harder They Come (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE HARDER THEY COME
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $105
publictheater.org

There’s a big difference between a show or movie with music and a fully fledged musical, in which original songs help propel the narrative. That divergence is one of the central flaws in the world premiere of The Harder They Come, at the Public’s Newman Theater through April 9.

The 1972 movie is a Jamaican cult favorite that recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary; it follows a country boy named Ivanhoe Martin, portrayed by reggae legend Jimmy Cliff in his first and only starring role as an actor, who arrives in Kingston with little more than a guitar and the dream of making a hit record. The soundtrack is one of the all-time greats, consisting of genre-defining tunes by the Maytals (“Sweet and Dandy,” “Pressure Drop”), the Slickers (“Johnny Too Bad”), Desmond Dekker (“007 [Shanty Town]”), the Melodians (“Rivers of Babylon”), Scotty (“Draw Your Brakes”), and Cliff himself, who contributed six songs, including the title track, the only one written specifically for the film.

In her book, Public writer-in-residence and Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, who has written such hard-hitting plays as Topdog/Underdog, Fucking A, and Father Comes Home from the Wars . . . , squeezes too many songs that were background and incidental in the film into the show’s narrative, forcing them into the plot.

An accomplished singer-songwriter, as evidenced by her terrific Plays for the Plague Year, a three-hour intimate performance piece about the pandemic that reopens at Joe’s Pub on April 5, Parks adds several new songs to The Harder They Come, including “Hero Don’t Never Die,” “Please Tell Me Why,” and “Better Days,” expanding, and sometimes changing, the motivations of various characters as Parks attempts to smooth out the bumps and choppiness of the film.

Alas, that is part of its charm. And I’m still trying to understand why the second act opens with Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” which Cliff recorded in 1993 for the film Cool Runnings about the 1988 Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. The song was part of Reggae Hit the Town: Crucial Reggae 1968-1972, a bonus disc added to the soundtrack album years later; Dekker’s “Israelites” also is in the show from the same collection.

Preacher (J. Bernard Calloway) has a tight hold on his congregation in world premiere at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

The story is a rough and violent drama that begins with Ivan traveling to the big city to give his mother, Daisy (Jeannette Bayardelle), her pittance of an inheritance. She wants him to return to the country, but Ivan (Natey Jones) is determined to stay and become a star. With no place to go, he hooks up with the Holy Redeemer Church after meeting and instantly falling for the young and innocent Elsa (Meecah), the orphan ward of the church’s well-connected Preacher (J. Bernard Calloway).

Desperate to make a record, Ivan ultimately signs a terrible contract with local music mogul Hilton (Ken Robinson), a wealthy man who controls what gets played when and where. With no money, Ivan starts working for ganja dealer Jose (Dominique Johnson), who is in cahoots with a plainclothes cop named Ray (Dudney Joseph Jr). Everywhere he goes, Ivan creates conflict with the avaricious men of Kingston, battling religion, drug lords, law enforcement, and corporate greed in his determination to get what he believes he deserves. “You can get it if you really want it / But you must try, try and try, try and try,” he sings.

Instead of laying low like his best friend, Pedro (Jacob Ming-Trent), who also sells for Jose, Ivan can’t stop speaking his mind. After an altercation with a policeman, Ivan is on the run, attempting to hold things together while also reveling in his newfound fame.

Directed by Tony Taccone (Bridge & Tunnel, Wishful Drinking) with codirector Sergio Trujillo, who is best known for his choreography for jukebox bio-musicals (Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, A Bronx Tale), The Harder They Come contains numerous wonderful scenes with fabulous music, performed by a strong cast (Ming-Trent stands out, his character providing comic relief and an honest perspective) and an excellent six-piece band; Kenny Seymour’s orchestrations and arrangements do justice to the originals, although some snippets are too much of a tease and a few of Parks’s new songs are overly melodramatic. In addition, you never get to hear the title track in full; as a kind of encore, it is performed at the very end, but one stanza is curiously left out.

Local music mogul Hilton (Ken Robinson) offers Ivan (Natey Jones) a bad deal in The Harder They Come (photo by Joan Marcus)

Choreographer Edgar Godineaux makes sure the movement never gets out of hand on Clint Ramos and Diggle’s two-level shanty town set, strewn with garbage drums, used tires, multiple old TV sets and speakers on the walls, bamboo, palm leaves, and muted greens and yellows inspired by the Jamaican flag (found also on the railings near the stage), along with earth-toned colors that are also prominent in Emilio Sosa’s costumes. The sound is by Walter Trarbach, with lighting by Japhy Weideman.

In the film, directed by Perry Henzell and cowritten with Trevor Rhone, Cliff’s Ivan already had a hard edge, a willingness to become an outlaw to fight for what he thinks is fair. But in Parks’s version, Jones (Get Up Stand Up, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical) portrays a far more naive and good-natured Ivan, more sensitive to Elsa’s needs and not as inherently dangerous. Cliff’s Ivan is proud of what he did to the policeman and glories in becoming a hero-villain who cheats on his wife and smokes big spleefs, while Jones’s Ivan claims the incident was accidental and never fully inhabits the character’s bad side.

The show has been stripped of its nuance, too easily pitting good vs. evil amid hierarchical, colonialist power structures. While a lot has changed since the film came out half a century ago, a lot hasn’t. This theatrical iteration — Henzell oversaw the script for a 2005 British adaptation — ends up caught somewhere in between.

[Note: The Public is hosting the “Wheel & Come Again” art auction on the mezzanine level, with more than a dozen works available, from $300 to $1000, inspired by the film and musical, raising funds to benefit scholarships at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston.]

THE ALCHEMIST

Manoel Felciano, Reg Rogers, and Jennifer Sánchez play a trio of swindlers in Red Bull revival of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE ALCHEMIST
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through December 19, $70
Available for streaming January 12-26
www.redbulltheater.com
newworldstages.com

Red Bull Theater was one of the most active companies during the pandemic, presenting livestreamed reunion readings of previous productions, the online interview series RemarkaBULL Podversations, and deep explorations into Othello and Pericles. So it’s disappointing that its return to live, in-person theater is an overbaked version of Ben Jonson’s 1610 Jacobean farce, The Alchemist.

Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and directed by Jesse Berger — the same team that gave us the superb 2017 revival of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector — The Alchemist is a hot mess, a frantic, unrelenting satire laden with anachronistic references and modern speech that bury what Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously referred to as one of the “three most perfect plots ever planned.” (The other two, in his opinion, were Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.)

The tale is set in 1606 in the Lovewit mansion in London as plague rips through the land; the wealthy master has left for the countryside, reminding us that the rich haven’t changed much, considering their response to the current coronavirus pandemic. A voiceover announces at the start, “Some wear masks, just like you do, that cover the nose and mouth and comply with CDC guidelines at all times, including during the show, except while actively drinking at your seat, so if you’re going to drink, drink actively.”

Lovewit’s manservant, the rogue Face (Manoel Felciano), has teamed up with the charlatan alchemist Subtle (Reg Rogers) and their bawdy colleague, Dol Common (Jennifer Sánchez), to con members of the local community out of their money. When the trio learns that Lovewit is unexpectedly returning in two hours, they ramp up their schemes as they attempt to defraud the tobacconist Abel Drugger (Nathan Christopher), the law clerk Dapper (Carson Elrod), the deacon Ananias (Stephen DeRosa), and the knight Sir Epicure Mammon (Jacob Ming-Trent) and his butler from Brooklyn, the surly skeptic known as Surly (Louis Mustillo).

Red Bull returns to in-person theater with The Alchemist at New World Stages (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Subtle might think he is in charge, but Face is quick to remind him, “Recollect, sir: you were not long past known to all the neighborhood as that scurvy beetle who nothing did but loiter at the corner in moldy rags so thin scarce covered they your buttocks. I took pity on you, gave you roof and a bed, replaced your tatters with well-cut cloth, and introduced you to that household item called the bathing tub.” Subtle responds, “Recollect, sir: you were not long past that lowly servant who nothing did but sit your master’s house with no one to converse with save your brooms and dustpans. Twas I took pity on you, raised you up to your potential, taught you to present yourself so convincingly as a captain with a beard so nautical it could fool a blind man who’s never been to sea. Twas I conceived the scheme, tis I should take the largest share!” Meanwhile, Dol points out about their Venture Tripartite, “Well, if we three do not this treasure equal share, you two shall not share mine.”

Despite already having a heavy chest brimming with ill-gotten gains and Lovewit’s arrival fast approaching, Face and Subtle can’t control their greed when they learn of a wealthy widow, Dame Pliant (Teresa Avia Lim), who has come to town with her protective brother, Kastril (Allen Tedder). So they set out to scam her as well, agreeing not to tell Dol. Their nefarious plans play out in real time, a grandfather clock ticking away throughout the nearly two-hour show as things grow more and more frenetic and overwrought.

Red Bull and founding artistic director Berger know their way around classic works, as evidenced by their stellar adaptations of John Ford’s 1630s drama, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 comedy of manners, The School for Scandal, and Jonson’s 1606 English Renaissance satire, Volpone. But they try too hard to make The Alchemist relevant to this moment in time, sacrificing story for slapstick. Alexis Distler’s two-floor set is filled with doorways, a staircase, and surprise entryways, but the timing of the various door slams is too often slightly off. At one point Rogers ad-libbed about having to run up and down the stairs again, and we feel his pain. As always with Red Bull, the costumes (by Tilly Grimes) are wonderfully extravagant, as is Tommy Kurzman’s wig and makeup design.

The show suffers from being in the 199-seat Stage 5 at New World Stages, which is too small and intimate for such a broadly played farce; you’re liable to get whiplash from swiveling your head back and forth and up and down so much, particularly as Subtle changes from “a mystic newly come from Rotterdam” to “a fortune teller late of Portugal” to “a Swedish hypnotist learned in financial planning.” Perhaps it will be easier to take when it is available for streaming January 12-26.

In a program note, Hatcher wryly admits, “Of course, I did screw around with the plot. Ours is a slimmed down version of the play, with fewer characters and one setting instead of four. So, apart from dumbing down the highbrow jokes, ruining the perfect plot, tossing in anachronisms, and adding a song very much like one sung by Shirley Bassey in 1964, the play is pretty much your grandmother’s The Alchemist.” The talented cast, led by Obie winner Rogers, does its best with this dumbing down, seeming to enjoy themselves immensely, as did much of the audience the night I went. I wish I felt the same.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: MERRY WIVES

An exuberant cast welcomes Shakespeare in the Park back to the Delacorte in Merry Wives (photo by Joan Marcus)

MERRY WIVES
Central Park, Delacorte Theater
Monday – Saturday through September 18, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

Shakespeare in the Park returns to the Delacorte after a canceled 2020 Covid summer season with the Public Theater’s exuberant but overbaked Merry Wives, continuing through September 18. Adapted by actress and playwright Jocelyn Bioh, who has appeared in such shows as An Octoroon and The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood and written such works as School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play and Nollywood Dreams, the play is thoroughly updated but often feels like a mash-up of such sitcoms as What’s Happening!! and The Jeffersons with such reality programs as The Bachelorette and Real Housewives.

The evening begins with Farai Malianga in a Brooklyn Nets Kyrie Irving jersey pounding on his djembe and eliciting an engaging call-and-response with the audience. It’s a wonderful start, reminiscent of how the late Baba Chuck Davis would kick off BAM’s annual DanceAfrica series. The seating is less thrilling but important, divided into sections full of vaccinated people who may choose not to mask — most don’t — and two emptier sections of unvaccinated people who must be masked and socially distanced.

Merry Wives is set in modern-day South Harlem, with a cast of characters from Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Senegal, portrayed exclusively by actors of color. In 2019, Kenny Leon directed a fabulous all-Black version of Much Ado About Nothing, but lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Madams Ford (Susan Kelechi Watson) and Page (Pascale Armand) join forces in contemporary update of Merry Wives (photo by Joan Marcus)

There’s a reason why The Merry Wives of Windsor is so rarely presented; it’s only been performed at the Delacorte twice before, in 1974 (with George Hearn, Marilyn Sokol, Barnard Hughes, Cynthia Harris, Michael Tucker, and Danny DeVito) and 1994 (with Margaret Whitton, David Alan Grier, Andrea Martin, Brian Murray, and Tonya Pinkins). It’s not one of the Bard’s better plays, a Medieval farce that tears down one of his most beloved creations, Sir John Falstaff, far too mean-spiritedly. And too many of the devices and subplots — mistaken identity, the exchange of letters, secret romance — feel like hastily written retreads here.

Falstaff (Jacob Ming-Trent) is a Biggie Smalls–loving wannabe playa out to conquer laundromat owner Madam Nkechi Ford (Susan Kelechi Watson) and socialite Madam Ekua Page (Pascale Armand), making cuckolds of their husbands, the distinguished Mister Nduka Ford (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and the generous Mister Kwame Page (Kyle Scatliffe).

“Nah man, I’m serious,” the sweats-wearing Falstaff tells Pistol (Joshua Echebiri), one of his minions. Madam Page “did so course over my exteriors with such a greedy intention that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning-glass. She bears the purse too; she is from a region in Ghana, all gold and bounty. I will be cheaters to them both, and they shall be sugar mamas to me; we’re gonna have the Ghanaian and the Nigerian jollof rice! Go bear this letter to Madam Page — and this one to Madam Ford. And then, my friend, I will thrive! . . . I mean . . . We will thrive.”

Misters Kwame Page (Kyle Scatliffe) and Nduka Ford (Gbenga Akinnagbe) try to avoid being cuckolded in Bard farce in Central Park (photo by Joan Marcus)

At the same time, the Pages’ daughter, Anne (Abena), is considered the most eligible bachelorette in Harlem and is being wooed by the well-established Doctor Caius (David Ryan Smith), the shy, nervous Slender (Echebiri), and Anne’s true love, Fenton (MaYaa Boateng), whom no one approves of. Manipulating various elements are the caring Pastor Evans (Phillip James Brannon) and the busybody Mama Quickly (Angela Grovey). Madams Ford and Page get wind of Falstaff’s deceit and team up to confound him, while a jealous Mister Ford disguises himself as a Rastaman named Brook to try to uncover Falstaff’s plan to bed his wife. “Please, off with him!” Sir John tells Brook about Ford. “I will stare him out of his wits, I will awe him with my club; I shall hang like Lebron James over the cuckold’s horns.” It all concludes with a series of matches that are as playful as they are convenient and contemporary.

Beowulf Boritt’s set is fabulous, consisting of the facades of a health clinic, a laundromat, and a hair braiding salon, which open up to reveal various interiors. Dede Ayite’s gorgeous costumes honor traditional African designs with bold colors and patterns. But director Saheem Ali (Fireflies, Fires in the Mirror), the Public’s associate artistic director who helmed audio productions of Romeo y Julieta, Richard II, and Anne Washburn’s Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017 during the pandemic lockdown, can’t get a grip on the story, instead getting lost in silly, repetitive slapstick that overwhelms the narrative. The laughs come inconsistently, settling for trivial humor over sustained comedy. This Merry Wives is a crowd pleaser the way familiar but routine sitcoms and reality shows are; light and frothy, none too demanding, but once they’re done, you’re on to the next program.

FREE SHAKESPEARE ON THE RADIO: RICHARD II

richard ii radio

Who: Barzin Akhavan, Sean Carvajal, Michael Bradley Cohen, Sanjit De Silva, Biko Eisen-Martin, Michael Gaston, Stephen McKinley Henderson, André Holland, Miriam A. Hyman, Merritt Janson, Elijah Jones, Dakin Matthews, Jacob Ming-Trent, Maria Mukuka, Lupita Nyong’o, Okwui Okpokwasili, Estelle Parsons, Tom Pecinka, Phylicia Rashad, Reza Salazar, Thom Sesma, Sathya Sridharan, John Douglas Thompson, Claire van der Boom, Natalie Woolams-Torres, Ja’Siah Young
What: Audio broadcast of Richard II over four consecutive nights
Where: WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820
When: July 13-16, free (donations accepted), 8:00
Why: The Public Theater was originally set to present a rare production of Richard II from May 19 to June 21 at the Delacorte this season; the only other times Shakespeare in the Park tackled the first play in the Henriad were in 1961 with Gladys Vaughan, J. D. Cannon, and James Earl Jones and again in 1987 with Marian Seldes, Rocky Carroll, Tony Shalhoub, and Peter MacNicol in the title role. The pandemic lockdown changed those plans, so instead, the late-sixteenth-century play, known in full as The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, will be performed on the radio by an all-star cast, specifically adapted for this time of coronavirus and BLM protests against police brutality. “A fractured society. A man wrongfully murdered. The palpable threat of violence and revenge against a broken system. Revolution and regime change. This was Shakespeare’s backdrop for Richard II,” director Saheem Ali said in a statement. “I’m exceptionally proud of this production, recorded for public radio with a predominantly BIPOC ensemble. It’s my hope that listening to Shakespeare’s words, broadcast in the midst of a pandemic and an uprising, will have powerful resonance in our world.” The stellar cast includes André Holland as the king, Elijah Jones as Hotspur, Sean Carvajal as Gardner’s Man and Surrey, Michael Gaston as Northumberland, Stephen McKinley Henderson as Gardener, Miriam A. Hyman as Bollingbroke, Dakin Matthews as Gaunt, Okwui Okpokwasili as Willoughby and Abbot, Estelle Parsons as the Duchess of York, Phylicia Rashad as the Duchess of Gloucester, John Douglas Thompson as York, and Lupita Nyong’o as the narrator. For the production, the Public has teamed up with WNYC, which will stream the audio online and on the radio (93.9 FM and AM 820) in four hourlong parts, July 13-16 at 8:00.

The adapted script is available here, and you can follow Ambereen Dadabhoy’s nightly synopsis here. “What must the King do now? Must he submit? / The King shall do it. Must he be deposed? / The King shall be contented. Must he lose / The name of King? I’ God’s name, let it go,” the king says, in words that still sting today. “My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, / My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown, / My figured goblets for a dish of wood, / My scepter for a palmer’s walking staff, / My subjects for a pair of carved saints / And my large kingdom for a little grave, / A little, little grave, an obscure grave; / Aumerle, thou weep’st, my tender-hearted cousin! / We’ll make foul weather with despised tears; / Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn / And make a dearth in this revolting land.”

THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

(photo by Henry Grossman)

Clarice (Adina Verson) and Silvio’s (Eugene Ma) true love is threatened in THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS (photo by Henry Grossman)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $85
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

“For nitwits are we all,” the cast declares early on in Theatre for a New Audience’s wacky version of Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte classic, The Servant of Two Masters, only the second time the show has ever been presented in English in New York City. The strange and crazy antics, involving lots of nitwits and numbskulls, take place over one very long day in Venezia, as the masked Truffaldino Batocchio from Bergamo (Steven Epp) serves up chaos while secretly serving two masters. The very hungry Truffaldino’s predicament derives from a typically byzantine plot: the supposed death of Federigo Rasponi from Torino is followed by the appearance of Federigo’s sister, Beatrice (Liz Wisan) — disguised as her brother in order to marry his betrothed, Clarice (Adina Verson), the daughter of his business partner, Pantalone (Allen Gilmore), and collect a promised dowry. Truffaldino immediately signs on to serve Federigo/Beatrice. Meanwhile, Clarice wants to marry her true love, Silvio (Eugene Ma), the pampered and overly twee progeny of Dr. Lombardi (Andy Grotelueschen). Later, when the valiant Florindo Aretusi (Orlando Pabotoy) shows up, Truffaldino accepts a position with him as well after Florindo’s aging porter (Liam Craig) proves inadequate. But even though Florindo and Beatrice are madly in love, neither knows the other is in town, and Truffaldino, who has become smitten with Smeraldina (Emily Young), Clarice’s maidservant, struggles to keep it that way so they won’t discover that he’s serving both of them. Over the course of two and a half hours (with intermission), there is masked mayhem, mistaken identity, slapstick comedy, devious deception, satirical songs (with onstage music by Christopher Curtis and Aaron Halva), and improvisation galore, some that works, and some that doesn’t.

(photo by Gerry Goodstein)

The cast of THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS has a blast in commedia dell’arte classic (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

In 2011, playwright Richard Bean and director Nicholas Hytner transformed The Servant of Two Masters into the hit Broadway comedy One Man, Two Guvnors, which earned James Corden a Tony for Best Actor. At TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, director Christopher Bayes (This Ridiculous Dreaming, The 39 Steps) and star Epp (Tartuffe, Figaro), veterans of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, have gone back to Goldoni’s more improvisational original, further adapting Constance Congdon’s version of Christina Sibul’s translation, eschewing a more structured narrative for large amounts of ad libbing. Thus, the play is different every night; right now it is rife with references to the presidential election that can range from wickedly funny to random and repetitive, along with nods to current commercial jingles that get chuckles but feel out of place. Valérie Thérèse Bart’s period costumes are a hoot, colorful and dankly elegant, while Katherine Akiko Day’s set is centered by a curtain through which the characters enter and exit, with a trompe l’oeil sky in the background in front of which are miniature houses. The cast, many of whom have worked together before either at Yale Rep or Juilliard, displays an infectious camaraderie and a willingness to try just about anything; Epp is a terrific physical comedian, harkening back to the days of vaudeville, while Pabotoy, Gilmore, and Fiasco Theater’s Grotelueschen and Young are stand-out commedia dell’arte practitioners. The play is probably about a half hour too long, and the anti-Trump jokes were often too easy and obvious, detracting from the overall atmosphere of chaotic fun. In the beginning, Truffaldino asks several times, “When’s the play going to start?” Near the conclusion, he declares, “This play’s never gonna end!” Of course, it does end, and you’ll leave the theater in a gleeful mood, if not completely satiated.

PUBLIC WORKS: TWELFTH NIGHT

public works twelfth night

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
September 2-5, free tickets available day of show, 8:00
publictheater.org

In 2013, the Public Theater initiated its Public Works program, an annual free Shakespeare production at the Delacorte that would bring together the community from all five boroughs in unique ways. “Public Works seeks to engage the people of New York by making them creators and not just spectators,” the mission statement explained. “Public Works deliberately blurs the line between professional artists and community members, creating theater that is not only for the people but by and of the people as well.” This year the Public is presenting a musical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, directed by actor, playwright, and director Kwame Kwei-Armah (Elmina’s Kitchen, Let There Be Love) and featuring music and lyrics by singer-songwriter Shaina Taub (Old Hats, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812), with choreography by Lorin Latarro (Waitress, Queen of the Night). The cast includes Nikki M. James as Viola, Andrew Kober as Malvolio, Jose Llana as Orsino, Jacob Ming-Trent as Sir Toby Belch, and Taub as Feste, along with some two hundred men, women, and children from primary participants 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 and cameos by COBU, Jambalaya Brass Band, the Love Show, New York Deaf Theatre, Ziranmen Wushu Training Center, and a United States postal carrier. Free tickets, two per person, will be available beginning at 12 noon at the Delacorte and the Public the day of the show as well as via a daily virtual ticketing lottery online.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: CYMBELINE

(photo by Carol Rosegg)

Posthumus (Hamish Linklater) and Iachimo (Raúl Esparza) make a dangerous bet as Philario (Patrick Page) looks on (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Through August 23, free, 8:30
shakespeareinthepark.org

Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s later, lesser-known plays, is not easy to bring to the stage. It’s a sort of greatest-hits mash-up of previous Bard themes and plot devices, lacking in memorable lines and named after a relatively minor character. So Tony-winning Shakespeare in the Park veteran Daniel Sullivan has added a large dose of whimsy to what turns out to be a rather charming and modern romantic comedy. In fact, whereas the first folio identifies it as “The Tragedy of Cymbeline,” a framed backdrop that is visible throughout nearly all of the Public Theater presentation calls it “The Story of Cymbeline,” as tragedy becomes farce. With war threatening between Britain and Rome in ancient times, King Cymbeline (Patrick Page) has banished Posthumus Leonatus (Hamish Linklater), a commoner who is married to, and very much in love with, his daughter, Imogen (Lily Rabe), so she can instead wed the queen’s not-too-swift progeny, Cloten (Linklater). Meanwhile, in a 1950s-era Vegas-y Rome, Posthumus boasts about his wife’s virtue, leading the Italian playboy Iachimo (Raúl Esparza), after performing a glitzy Sinatra-like number, to lay a wager that he can bed Imogen and despoil her honor. The bet is overseen by Philario (Page), a sharp-dressed gangster who is Posthumus’s host. As the queen conspires to poison Imogen, both Iacomo and Cloten attempt to woo the princess, who soon sets out for Wales disguised as a boy to set things straight with her one true love. But on the way she gets lost in the woods and is taken in by an oddball anarchist family consisting of a bent-over father (Kate Burton) and his two would-be sons (David Furr and Jacob Ming-Trent). It all leads to a dizzying finale with more than two dozen revelations coming fast and furious.

(photo by Carol Rosegg)

The cloddish Cloten (Hamish Linklater) makes his case to marry Imogen (Lily Rabe) (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sullivan (Proof, Twelfth Night) has a ball revealing the artifice behind the production while also taking the story to some surprising extremes. Riccardo Hernandez’s set features a pair of large gold frames and boxes and props from other Shakespeare productions (Hamlet, King Lear), reminding everyone of the machinations behind it all. There are several rows of audience members on either side of the stage who do indeed get involved in the action, while some of the actors sit at the back of the stage between their scenes. Rabe and Linklater, who are partners in real life and have previously appeared together in Seminar on Broadway and in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing at the Delacorte, are at their best in Cymbeline, she as the strong-willed and sexy Imogen, he going back and forth between the noble-to-a-fault Posthumus and the dumb-and-dumber Cloten (complete with Jim Carrey–like wig), pausing in his line readings for maximum double-entendre effect. Page (Casa Valentina, Cyrano de Bergerac) is gallant as the king and Philario, balancing power with a conscience; Burton is nicely wicked as the queen and almost unrecognizable as Belarius; four-time Tony nominee Esparza (Company, Taboo) is appropriately smarmy as Iachimo, who spans two eras; Teagle F. Bougere (A Raisin in the Sun, Macbeth) is solid as Roman ambassador Lucius and court doctor Cornelius, particularly in the grand finale; Steven Skybell (Pal Joey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) is engaging as Pisanio, Posthumus’s loyal servant who dedicates himself to Imogen; and Furr (As You Like It, The Importance of Being Earnest) and Ming-Trent (Hands on a Hardbody, Shrek the Musical) bring a sweet nature to their portrayals of the mountain brothers as well as the play’s narrators. Yes, it’s lesser Shakespeare, and at nearly three hours it runs too long (even with the excision of the Jupiter dream sequence), but Sullivan’s fanciful production is a whole lot more fun than Cymbeline usually is. (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.)