As You Like It is my favorite Shakespearean comedy after Twelfth Night, but when the actor playing Orlando can’t hang with the actor playing Rosalind, it prevents this pleasant diversion from being something deeper. I reviewed the Folger Theatre’s production in this week’s Washington City Paper.
Francesca Faridany’s Rosalind and John Behlmann’s Orlando.
All the world’s a stage, except when it’s a film set.
The Shakespeare Theatre’s new production of As You Like It, the philosophizing romantic comedy set largely in a curative mystical forest, has adopted the trappings of an altogether different wood, one that no one ever accused of being good for you. (That’d be the one that starts with Holly.) The show begins ingeniously as a flickering silent film with title cards, but quickly assumes the props and types of a modern movie shoot, with boom-mic operators and cameramen and headset-wearing production assistants scurrying between scenes. We even hear Ted van Griethuysen growl “Cut!” now and again. Continue reading
