Sunday, June 29, 2008
A+E, Theater, Reviews

Bored with the Bard

‘As You Like It’ not enough to counter Shakespeare overload

By Bert Osborne

Excuse me for daring to think it (let alone pose it in print), but am I the only one who’s almost had it up to here with Shakespeare? Yes, he’s probably the greatest writer who ever lived and all that, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing. Between Georgia Shakespeare and Atlanta Shakespeare, plus isolated productions by other companies, I typically take in 10 or 12 of the Bard’s shows each season. But given the former group’s success with the likes of “Metamorphoses” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” or the latter’s with “Cabaret” and “Of Mice and Men,” would it kill anybody to go a year (hell, maybe two) without seeing any of his plays? After all, didn’t the man himself coin that expression about absence making the heart grow fonder?
 
Perhaps I’m writing out of turn, insofar as “As You Like It” is just the first of three Bard shows in Georgia Shakespeare’s 23rd annual summer rep (with “The Merchant of Venice” and “All’s Well That Ends Well” still to come). However poetically spoken his plays, a lot of their plots seem vaguely derivative, especially among his mistaken-identity comedies. No matter how many times I’ve seen them, I’d barely know a cross-dressing romantic heroine like Rosalind/Ganymede in “As You Like It” from a cross-dressing romantic heroine like Viola/Cesario in “Twelfth Night.”
 
That’s why there are directors, of course—to put enough of a unique or exciting spin on a classic to keep it from feeling so familiar or redundant. Karen Robinson’s new staging of “As You Like It” adopts a ’60s “Summer of Love” motif that’s more showy than telling: a flower-powered set (by Kat Conley); groovy costumes (by Sydney Roberts) including headbands, tie-dyed shirts or go-go boots; and sundry bits involving a wrestling biker, a love guru or strolling hippie minstrels. (Even then, Robinson could have taken it further. Curiously disregarding the sexual liberation and drug culture of that era is the difference between a mellow little buzz and a big psychedelic trip.)
 
Whatever its stylistic concept, the whole premise of the play turns on our willing suspension of disbelief that the fair maiden Rosalind, while in drag as a boy named Ganymede, woos and wins the man of her dreams. Most distressingly here, if you’d never seen Park Krausen’s competent work in the past, you might wonder who the actress thinks she’s fooling. By scarcely exerting any effort to adjust her voice, posture, movements or mannerisms, she not only undercuts the credibility of Daniel May’s Orlando as a “nimble wit”—she essentially takes the fun out of it for those of us in the audience who already know how everything’s going to end, anyway. SP
 

 DULY NOTED:

 
Although it’s not for his lack of trying, Craig Waldrip isn’t much more believable as a woman in the Actor’s Express rock musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (directed by Freddie Ashley), a revival of the troupe’s 2003 hit about a transgendered German nightclub singer. It’s conceived as a concert, in which Hedwig recounts her sad, sordid story through songs and banter that will be largely lost on anyone outside of the show’s pre-existing fan base. Through July 19. 404-607-7469. www.actors-express.com.
 
There’s a first time for everything. I’ve never felt the need before to apologize for any of my reviews, but now I have two mea culpas to extend regarding last week’s mention of Theatre Decatur’s “A ... My Name is Alice,” in which I inexcusably misidentified one of the actresses in the cast. It may be too little, too late (the show has now closed)—but to both Carla Selden (whom I meant to single out for praise) and Camilla Zaepfel (whom I credited by mistake), I’m truly sorry.