Posted on: Wednesday, July 14, 2004
STAGE REVIEW
Casting raises pitch of Shakespearean comedy
By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic
The third year of Hawai'i's summer Shakespeare festival opens with "Love's Labors Lost," a burst of unrestrained nonsense crafted when the author was just starting out in the playwriting business.
Brad Goda He's mostly right. It just makes it sillier. And in a skimpy plot line where supporting players are already interchangeable by character, they might as well be interchangeable by gender.
King Ferdinand (Jessica Quinn) and his hangers-on have no sooner sworn themselves to three years of fasting, study, and avoiding women than a French princess and her ladies in waiting beset them.
Gilbert and Sullivan reversed this situation and set it to music in their "Princess Ida." Shakespeare has his quartet of lovers argue it out in iambic pentameter. Pisculli adds in light musical accompaniment with percussion and reeds performed by Damned Spot Drums.
Not surprisingly, the men immediately forsake their vows and pursue the women, who play hard to get. There are jokes, disguises, confused identities and a gang of rustics who put on a play within a play — all plot devices that Shakespeare repeated more successfully in later works.
So the primary interest in "Love's Labors Lost" is to see how it opened the way for what was to come.
8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday; 4 p.m., Sunday
Paliku Theatre, Windward Community College
$8-$16; season ticket to all three shows, $36.
235-7433 Robideau — whom Pisculli directed last year as Lady Macbeth — displays wonderful clarity of word, meaning, and emotion as she turns the Elizabethan dialogue into the music that it can be. The transformation doesn't redeem all the nonsense that precedes it, but it gives something to anticipate.
Otherwise, the youthful cast gives Shakespeare's words the old college try with Anglicized enunciation and hell-bent energy that counts on emotion being contagious. In this, the all-female cast sometimes runs into trouble, with similarly high-pitched and indistinguishable voices. Too much of the meaning is lost among the high notes, leading to an annoying suspicion that the cast has conspired to encode the dialogue in a way that only they can decipher.
The problem is compounded when the male characters disguise themselves as Russians, add comic Slavic accents, and speak through bushy fake beards. The women counter by putting up Lady Rosaline (Miriam Neuman) to impersonate the princess, complete with a mangled French accent of her own.
One longs for deeper tones, ultimately supplied only by Ashley Larson's raspy baritone impersonation of Don Armado, a pompously comic character in an unrealized subplot involving a pregnant serving girl.
Among the courtiers, Jennifer Vo puts in an energetic effort as Lord Berowne, suitor to Lady Rosaline. Among the rustics, Joanna Sotomura is on the right track as Costard and has some good comic moments during the play within a play.
For an early comedy that turns poignant at the end "Love's Labors Lost" is historically interesting and ultimately, funnier than "Hamlet."
Director Tony Pisculli stages it with women in all the roles, as he did during the festival's inaugural season with "Two Gentlemen of Verona." Pisculli explains in the program notes that the female casting makes good use of disproportionate gender numbers at auditions. He says it doesn't hurt the play.
Miriam Neuman, left, is Rosaline and Jennifer Robideau is the French princess in a college production of "Love's Labors Lost" with an all-female cast.
Curiously, its best moment isn't silly at all: It comes late in the play when the merriment is interrupted with an unexpected and sobering message. That gives Jennifer Robideau the opportunity to turn the play's closing scene pensive and quietly introspective.
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'Love's Labors Lost'
