In his one-man show, almost two decades ago “Laugh Whore,” the actor-comedian Mario Cantone recalled his struggles trying to inject life into Public Theater revivals of Shakespeare, playing the comic foil Stephano opposite Patrick Stewart’s Prospero in “The Tempest.”It didn’t work out and Cantone promised never to perform Shakespeare again. “These are 400-year-old jokes,”He was sad. “You make them funny!”
The Bard’s comedies remain a challenge — for modern theater-makers as well as audiences. The Public Theater has had great success in transforming these shows into musicals. This was nearly a decade ago. “Love’s Labour’s Lost”Alex Timbers, composer Michael Feldman and Shaina Taub gave their director a contemporary update. Kwame Kwei Armah, Shaina Taub and Shaina Taub created a fleet of-foot musical reimagining in 2018. “Twelfth Night”This hit a lot high notes (and featured Nikki M. James’ star turn).
Now Taub has returned to the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park for a reworking of “As You Like It,”The story of a young woman who is exiled from her kingdom to the wild Forest of Arden where she falls in love with a similarly banished young man. She disguises herself as a man. Due to this being a Shakespearean comedy there are parallel love stories. Two of them involve mostly comedic characters. Taub and Laurie Woolery, the director, have reimagined these as same-sex couples.
All these shenanigans build to a quadruple wedding that involves a stage rush of dozens of ensemble members, mostly amateurs from the city’s five boroughs who have been rehearsing as part of the Public Theater’s Public Works program (half perform each night). Taub, who plays the misanthropic Jacques and a type of M.C., are also pros on stage. who bookends the show with a tune based on the play’s most famous aphorism: “All the world’s a stage.”
For the most part, it all works — though there are quite a few rough patches along the way. Taub does not seem tempted to explore the transgender inclinations of the the show’s heroine, Rosalind (Rebecca Naomi Jones, a strong singer who showed some vocal strain at the performance I saw), who butches herself up as Ganymede as she slyly pursues her crush, Orlando (Ato Blankson-Wood, a wide-eyed standout with a crystalline voice).
Taub has also written some lovely tunes that bring a modern sensibility to the creaky 17th-century plot, turning Orlando’s marriage proposal into a Boyz 2 Men-style boy-band ballad (including dancing backup singers and a rhinestone-encrusted microphone) and crafting a lovely tune where Rosalind-as-Ganymede pretends to be a woman so that Orlando can practice his courtship skills. “I’ll flirt with you one second, act like I don’t care the next; drop a breadcrumb I adore you, then ignore your text,”She sings. You can hear and see the Shakespearean patterns in tunes such as these.
Taub also has loaded her score full of clunkers. This includes a badly-conceived country dance and many other songs that look like missed opportunities. And just as Cantone predicted, the show breaks down in the book scenes that more faithfully lean on the Bard’s original text — and all those 400-year-old jokes — as well as archaic tropes like the court clown Touchstone (Christopher R. Ramirez) that elicit more cringing than laughter.
Yet, Central Park is as stunningly beautiful as the Forest of Arden.
