Yes, Shakespeare in Love is a winner of an original comedy, but since this is a “North American premiere by special arrangement with Disney Theatrical Productions and Sonia Friedman Productions,” I haven’t heard whether Stratford could take it to Broadway. Not a bad idea, though. None of the charm of the film is lost here, but, of course, Stratford has a picnic with the jokey origins and Elizabethan attitudes toward the young playwright from Stratford Upon Avon. And for this world-famous Shakespeare repertory theater and its huge international audience, the in-jokes and references to the Shakespeare canon are familiar and loved. So it seems to me that there’s more first-rate, loving enjoyment of Shakespearean details and quotations here and less cutesy efforts to introduce and explain them than in the film. The script, however, is pretty much faithful to the somewhat patronizing one of Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard for the film. But this production’s commanding presence of Tom McCamus as the Ferryman, Luke Humphrey’s comic male ingénue approach to Will Shakespeare, the hilarious frenzies of Stephen Oimette’s Hemslowe (who has paid Shakespeare for two plays and can’t get one started or stop the one that has a [control your horror!] REAL woman playing Juliet onstage), Steve Ross’s hammy, possessive actor Burbage, Shannon Taylor’s lovely readings of her Lady Viola’s scandalous acting, and Saamer Usman’s “restrained swashbuckler” approach to the legendary Kit Marlowe – all raise Stratford’s Shakespeare in Love to a perhaps more sophisticated and surely no-less-appealing level. And Nick Ormerod’s designs are almost a separate pleasure in themselves.
