A playful way to spend a summer evening
by Tony Brown
Cleveland Plain Dealer Theater Critic
July 15, 2003
The Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, that band of brave and merry souls who traverse Cuyahoga County from east to west to downtown with the Bard in tow, has lured Seth Gordon of the Cleveland Play House into the great outdoors to direct "Twelfth Night."
Gordon uses his considerable directing chops to the fullest with this quickie, two-hour version of this tricky Shakespeare comedy, which begins in mourning and ends with multiple wedding bells.
The acting is uneven and the costumes and special effects are, as usual, threadbare. But the laughs, largely at the expense of yellow-socked, cross-gartered Malvolio, are plenteous, especially late in the play as the sun sets in the west, lost twins reunite and happy couples follow one another to the altar in exotic Illyria.
Gordon seems to want us to believe the play is set in the 1960s, though the references are vague. There is meditating, bongo-playing, Eastern-influenced incidental music from local playwright and composer Linda Eisenstein, and a Beatlesque haircut or two.
More important, the director has rigged up several primitive but effective watery special effects that add to the general sense of frivolity.
Two lawn sprinklers attached to the Shaker Heights Colonnade, where "Twelfth Night" opened over the weekend, wet down various cast members as if they were out in the rain. And Duke Orsino takes a shower courtesy of a third, hand-held sprinkler.
Gordon also trims several darker Malvolio scenes and makes a deft gender-switch, transforming Antonio into Antonia, changing the meaning of the character's declaration of love to Sebastian, one of the shipwrecked twins.
This alteration points up the gender-switching already abundantly used in the play. A boyish Kat McIntosh has a young Paul McCartney freshness when her Viola (the other lost twin) changes into boys clothes to become Cesario, in which guise she falls in love with Orsino - and countess Olivia falls in love with her.
Bernadette Clemens exudes elegance as Olivia, and Jesse James Kamps has a macho air as Orsino. Among the actors in overtly comic roles, Robert Hawkes makes a pompous Malvolio and Allen Branstein a gaseous and squat Sir Toby Belch.
Those who attempt to compare this production with the ominous but hilarious production directed a couple of seasons ago by Daniel Fish at Great Lakes Theater Festival will be disappointed. The vision of the play isn't nearly as clear, the production values are cheap, and the effectiveness of the acting varies widely from one role to the next.
But as a free outdoor entertainment on a lazy summer evening, this "Twelfth Night" goes down like the food of love.
Play on, Cleveland Shakespeare, play on.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: tbrown@plaind.com, 216-999-4181
© 2003 The Plain Dealer.