Living up to the title, Stratford Artistic Director Des McAnuff's opening-night production of Shakespeare's popular comedy had the audience exiting at its finale with pretty much universally happy grinning faces. Despite a glittering production with an almost overpoweringly talented cast who certainly let us know that this was the work of a truly great company on Stratford's Festival Theatre's world-renowned huge thrust-stage, the production was not free of little glitches, jarring elements, and moments that dragged. But it worked hard and mostly successfully to entertain, often dazzled, and left a sweet, convincingly romantic sense of delight.
That seems to me to be basically Des McAnuff's gift, which is why I reacted to the surprise announcement that he will direct Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ, Superstar for Stratford's 2011 season with the feeling that he is the perfect choice to stage it. It was such a stunning concept album that I was surprised and disappointed to find that, unlike the great show made from Lloyd Webber's concept album of Evita, Superstar turned out to be a rather dull and uneven theater piece. If anyone can give it consistent pizzazz and make it thrilling, McAnuff can. He has demonstrated a genius for making disparate elements of stage musicals pull together into constantly surprising and pleasing effects with a showmanship that possibly hoodwinks an audience into believing it richer and more meaningful than it is, or at any rate willing to consider it close enough to greatness.
In As You Like It, McAnuff demonstrates his tendency to approach scenes with two or three times the number of ideas one would normally try to introduce into them, and if some seem excessive or even wrong-headed, no one could call his interpretation thin or unimaginative. That approach didn't work on last year's Macbeth, but even on that dread assignment he came close.
Debra Hanson is one of my favorite designers, but she is directed to work in too many styles here. Clocks and banners and rural-looking projected scenes and a gaudy profusion of wild-colored designs under glass, and dancerlike creatures with animal's heads, coexist here with mostly 1920s clothing but in such varied styles to make one wonder if these people are all living in the same climate. The idyllic Forest of Arden is contrasted perhaps too viciously with very realistic violence from the usurpers of the good Duke's court. But a lion in a European rural setting is less jarring than ugly torture and killings in a play where all the bad guys repent and reform at the end and the only one left who is truly unsocial is the sad Jacques, whose famed "All the world's a stage" speech is very quietly and movingly offered by Brent Carver.
Like Carver, another previous great Hamlet is Ben Carlson, who makes the jester Touchstone both a delicious snobbish misplaced courtier viewing these rustics with barbed contempt, then a virtually ecstatic sensualist pursuing the vulgar goatherd Audrey with lust which he surprisingly elevates into adoration.
Stratford's famed leading actress and beauty Lucy Peacock has been having much fun playing slatterns like Audrey recently, and she shares that fun with us here.
Paul Nolan seems very young and modern as the romantic hero Orlando, but he can woo and clown and win the wrestling match with Dan Chameroy with panache. Cara Ricketts is another Celia who plays the second banana role to the central Rosalind with such charm that she steals scenes from her cross-dressing friend. And Mike Shara shifts almost without transition from nasty older brother plotting against Orlando to caring sibling and dashing suitor to Celia.
I was less enchanted by Andrea Runge's Rosalind than most seemed to be, partly because I found her unconvincingly boyish. But she ends the play like its star.
