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By William Shakespeare
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
A magical celebration of romance, passion and unity, pitting young love against the vanity of the court in a rich tale of exiled lovers, of woodland meanderings, of mistaken identity and disguise, and of wrongs set right. A lavishly staged romantic comedy. Opens April 6 - May 6
Previews April 4
Sunday Matinee Performance April 8
REVIEWSDate: April 10, 2001
Excerpts from Review by: Elizabeth Maupin, Orlando Sentinel Where were you in the Summer of Love? If you weren't in the forest of Arden, chances are now that you wish you were. Arden is filled with such sweet-tempered, tie-dyed foolishness in the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's 1960s-era As You Like It that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi would feel right at home. And this 400-year-old romantic comedy nestles into the embracing arms of the hippie era almost as if Shakespeare and Timothy Leary had had an extraterrestrial meeting of the minds. Director Eric Hissom's staging doesn't always connect to the play's intentions, but the 1600-to-1967-or-so transition makes more sense than you might think.
Flower power works in mysterious ways. From the moment a guy in a military police uniform confronts the laid-back band of folkies who start this show, the lines are drawn: a big, bad government is on one side of As You Like It and the back-to-nature types on the other. In Shakespeare's comedy, it's the evil Duke Frederick who has taken over the government and sent his elder brother, Duke Senior, and his followers running to the forest.
If Duke Frederick and his men bring to mind the Nixon White House and the philosophizing Duke Senior a Leary-type guru, so much the better for a baby-boomer audience eager to get a grasp on this play. In As You Like It, the forest of Arden is a backdrop to love stories of all sorts: love at first sight, bawdy love, besotted love and especially honest, tempered love, the kind that develops between Rosalind and her Orlando, the heroine and hero of the play.
The two meet in the city, and immature Orlando is swept off his feet. But when they run into each other again in the forest, both of them fleeing for their lives, Rosalind has disguised herself as a boy. And she decides to use her masquerade to teach Orlando what love really is. Hissom and his festival cohorts have filled their production with all of the trappings of the late '60s (and a few neighboring eras) you can think of -- the music of Buffalo Springfield and the Youngbloods, a candy-blue suitcase covered with daisy decals, a Playboy Bunny, Paul Stookey's "Wedding Song."
A long-haired troubadour (Steve Lyons) uses modern narration to escort you through the show, and even the words to Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" are changed a tad to connect Arden and Yasgur's Farm as close as they can be. Yet hardly any of this gets in the way of a sweet, comical story, served beautifully by the actors at its core.
Grace Gonglewski's Rosalind seems muted in her Julie Nixon getup at the start of the show, but, once she transforms herself into a boy in overalls, she's as bright and plucky as heroines come. Richard Width's Orlando moves from querulous schoolboy to intrepid young man as the play runs its course. And it's clear what drives these lovers into each other's arms: These are a man and a woman who make each other laugh.
The cast is studded with bright spots: Randy Culzac as Charles, the Super Fly-style wrestler; Lucious Conway as the feeble old manservant Adam (the role Shakespeare himself is said to have played); Jason Flora as the grave, sensible shepherd named Corin; and especially Dathan B. Williams as the clownish Touchstone, a wildly urban hipster who bursts into the forest like James Brown onto a stage.
...Lyons and his fellow musicians (especially sweet-voiced fiddler Navida Stein) do a wonderful job interpreting Shakespeare's songs as late-'60s folk rock... You can laugh all you want at the show's WWF wrestling or the music from Peter Gunn. But when a full moon rises over Lake Eola and you're also laughing out loud at Shakespeare's words, this As You Like It is doing its job.
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