On Stage

...While by contrast Mary Louise Wilson does a fine job as Maria—Olivia's maid and the author of the letter that eventually undoes Malvolio—Mark Ramos as Festes the Clown is totally without charm or interest...

...The secondary cast pleases less...

...His Malvolio has no ill-will and no self-love...

...But then there is Lynn Redgrave's Viola...

...and considering Dishy's performance, it is equally incomprehensible why the proud, austere Olivia would hire such an obviously ineffectual man as her steward...

...nothing in it lends itself to making points about French and British imperialism, or about World War I and 16th century France...

...As Bertram, the young aristocrat who spurns her because he considers the daughter of a doctor beneath him, Mark Linn Baker is intriguingly poutish, a chubby unpleasant lad not yet conversant with himself, others or life...

...A good deal of the blame, of course, rests with Freedman, but he has help from the performers...

...Joseph Bova, with his gruff, thick affability, would have been a perfect Squire Western in a dramatization of Tom Jones...

...For Sir Andrew Aguecheek, idiot knight and cohort of Belch, Stephen Vino-vich displays talents that are too small: He shrinks in the role as the play progresses, until he disappears completely, leaving behind mere husks of gesture and voice...

...When, for example, the braggart and word-monger Parolles is lured into a trap by soldiers camouflaged as shrubbery, Leach, instead of concentrating attention on Parolles' fearful ruminations concentrates it on the moving bushes...

...The two lead actors are as diminutive as the set, though in their case it is solely a matter of physical size and not of talent...

...But if music be the food of love, acting and directing are the food of theater...

...It is done, one must conclude, because it looks interesting and different—a silly albeit common reason in today's theater for perpetrating such nonsense...

...Director Gerald Freedman has located the play in the early 18th century, striving mightily—and with the help of Ming Cho Lee's ballroom set and Jeanne Button's costumes, successfully—to produce an Illyria that looks like a Watteau painting come to life...

...Under the withering light of such multifaceted incompetence, Twelfth Night shrivels, a radiant masterpiece turned into a drab weed...

...Then there is the matter of costumes (by Carol Oditz), which...

...All's Well is not Coriolanus...

...Others fail in their execution by bad timing, bad blocking, bad acting...

...du Deffand, those qualities were bought at a price that we have also come to associate with the Augus-tans: "the intimacy of personal passion, the intensity of high endeavor —these things must be left behind and bitterly cast away...

...Malvolio's final threat of revenge is not allowed to carry any weight either, because just after he utters it, he leaves the stage through the wrong door, comes back on, looks about and finally exits through the right one...

...And after a short stroll through the theater's surrounding grounds, which—except for the fact that they are the capital of mos-quitoland—have a pastoral beauty, I was positively looking forward to the production inside, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night...

...It would be a great boon both to Wilford Leach's own career and to theatergoers if, in the future, he left Shakespeare to more capable hands...

...What the purpose is of combining these two styles escapes me...

...The evening closes as it begins, with some of the cast giving evocative renditions of what (I think) were Elizabethan songs...

...as Toby Belch, a miniature Fal-staff, he is obscenely miscast, unable to convey to an audience the roguish-ness that makes Belch appealing...

...He has provided melodies for All's Well That Ends Well—melodies badly sung by a vocally ill-equipped cast...

...her love, her pain, her atonement, were all supremely believable—a Fitting performance from one of the best young actresses in New York theater...

...Some productions of Shakespeare fail in their conception—for instance, when Hamlet is played in modern dress...

...My greatest disappointment was Larry Pine (Parolles), who I remember seeing in my college days in a superb performance of Andrei Gregory' production of Endgame...

...Friendship might be allowed there and flirtation disguised as love, but the overweening and devouring influence of love itself should never be admitted...

...York's Central Park, Wilford Leach is making music, too...

...Particularly poor are the comic scenes revolving around the baiting and ensnarement of Malvolio—Olivia's steward, who would ban "cakes and ale"—by Sir Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek, Festes, and Maria...

...When these two are on the stage, they rouse us from our torpor and breathe into the play what it most lacks—passion...

...Very funny...

...The whittling down process begins with the set, designed by Leach...

...The net effect, is of an urban neurotic—rather inappropriate, I think, for a heroine who has some of the Bard's loveliest and gentlest verse...

...An actor of standard height stands eye to eye with the turrets of the castle, producing an Alice in Wonderland effect that undermines the play without anything being gained in the process...

...Regrettably, this sort of thing is indicative of Leach's entire approach to the play...

...Elizabeth Wilson as Bertram's mother, for whom nobility is a matter of character and not of birth—the great lesson Bertram must learn—offers us the right mix of dignity, royalty and femininity at its apogee...

...The one scene where Malvolio can rouse our sympathy—his languishing in a dungeon—is botched by the director, who places the archetypal kill-joy below the stage and out of view...

...He apparently conceives of it as a light little farce, and a flawed one at that, needing all sorts of gimmickry to make it work...

...The play's love scenes are slightly better...

...Unfortunately, Freedman's ability to handle actors, his actors' ability to handle acting, and the whole lot's ability to handle Shakespearean language, is only dimly apparent...

...swear?are a mix of medieval and French circa 1910 dress...

...After all, that era almost immediately brings to mind a certain fineness of sentiment and sweetness of temperament...

...They were so courteous and generous—providing bus service to the scene of the action, complete with picnic lunch boxes and handsome amounts of wine—that I disembarked at Stratford glowing with bonhomie...

...Still, in all fairness, I should note that Freedman helps strike Dishy down...

...This is really quite an accomplishment, for among the roles in the Shakespearean canon, Bertram is one of the most sketchily conceived...

...Twelfth Night left me ravenous...

...Now, this may initially seem a fine idea...

...Redgrave, to judge by her last two parts (I last saw her as Saint Joan), is beginning to specialize in androgynous roles—which may not be a bad career choice, since she seems incapable of conveying sexuality...

...Only a forehead and a pleading pair of hands are visible, forcing us to focus on Mark Lamos stupidly prancing about the stage as he destroys his lines...

...Recently, however, all my preparations came to naught, thanks chiefly to the press relations staff of the American Shakespeare Theater at Stratford, Connecticut...

...Accordingly, he reduces the most intriguing of all Shakespeare's romances—really a morality play with a quest theme—to the level of Broadway fluff (or perhaps lower, since Broadway fluff generally makes no pretensions...

...Here, courtesy of Penny Fuller's Olivia, a noblewoman who falls in love with a woman, and of Lawrence Guittard's distinguished Orsino, in love with Olivia, we are given acting...

...What she can convey is an innocence under assault: She bends her head to the side, looks amazedly about when she arrives at the meat of a speech, roars at the top of her lungs...

...Frances Conroy (Diana), who I also remember fondly for her Cordelia earlier this year, appears to be a bit on a downward fall as well, perhaps accelerated in this instance by having to speak her lines with an Italian accent —an idiotic notion of Leach's that was but one small desecration among many larger ones...

...and, second, too drawn out...

...None of this motley crew's shenanigans come off: They are, in fact, tedious...

...As Helena, a woman embarked on a quest for the love of the caddish Bertram—and considered by Shaw a prototype of his aggressive heroines—Pamela Reed is engaging...

...The style of the production, in short, works against the meaning of the play...

...It looks like a miniature golf course: a tiny castle of Rossillion at one side of the stage, a tiny Notre Dame to represent Paris in the middle of it, and a tiny gold and red row of houses representing Florence at the other end...

...Finally, there are dozens of little comic devices that are, first, too mechanical, too obviously stuck in only for comedy and not for the furthering of the text...

...any man who had swallowed a handful of Seconals and walked on stage in yellow stockings and garters would, I suspect, have dished out a livelier performance...

...That alone, though, might not be disastrous...

...It is impossible to believe that the cabal of Belch, Festes, Maria, and Aguecheek would trouble themselves with putting down such a harmless, colorless wimp...

...Indeed, it has nothing at all...

...The only result of his liberty taken with Shakespeare's verse is that our ears are beseiged and the verse swamped by cacophonous noise...

...Alas, I was taken for a ride in more than a literal sense...

...Hardly the world Twelfth Night describes: It has no room for Shakespeare's comic subversions, or for his glorious, intimate passion...

...But the worst of all is Bob Dishy...

...The timing is so bad that the characters always seem to talk past each other, as if they were reading a tele-prompter in the wings, and jokes are thrown away in a flurry of gratuitous action...

...Yet as Lytton Strachey wrote in a biographical sketch of Mme...

...For there is always the piece itself, an embodiment of love madness that Hazlitt called "one of the most delightful of Shakespeare's comedies...

...This one fails both ways...

...Pine's indisputable comic talent seems to have deserted him: his Parolles is merely a strutting, arm-waving, eye-rolling drudge...