Summary 
Transplanting As You Like It to the 1870s American western frontier works as a colorful onstage entertainment, but the myth of Arden forest as a redeeming and purifying atmosphere does not correlate well with wild west expansion and especially the subtexts of genocide and gross misuse of natural resources. Onstage musicians play an original country music score, and the costume and set designs are a delight to behold, a grand framing for an intimate romance.
Design
Directed by Michael Maggio. Set by John Culbert. Lights by Kevin Rigdon. Costumes by Virgil Johnson. Sound by Michael Bodeen. Original music by Miriam Sturm and Michael Bodeen.
Cast
Mark Espinoza (Orlando), Ernest Perry, Jr. (Adam), David Studwell (Oliver), Ted Koch (Charles/William), Ronald Keaton (Touchstone), Lisa Tejero (Celia), Karen Raymore (Rosalind), Sean Fortunato (Le Beau/Jaques de Boys), Rick Snyder (Duke Frederick/Duke Senior), Luke Nelson (Amiens), Craig Spidle (Corin), David Darlow (Jaques), Lara Phillips (Audrey), Peter Toran (Dennis/Sir Oliver Martext), Heidi Mokrycki (Phoebe).
Analysis
The Goodman Theatre modernizes As You Like It to the wild west frontier of America in the 1870s, contrasting the untamed wilderness, like the Forest of Arden, with the metropolitan cities of the East Coast. The historical senses of westward expansion, land claim frenzy, manifest destiny and gold rush don't quite equate with the text's liberation and freedom within a rural - and pointedly anti-urban - countryside. But director Michael Maggio imbues the production with exceptional staging, live music, and liberal doses of humor - the poster and print ads promise "comedy, romance - and music!" - across almost three-and-a-half hours.
Rosalind is played as a strong-willed heroine, tall and lanky and perhaps confined by her hyper-urban big city environment. Smitten by Orlando, she coaches him throughout the heated wrestling match with Charles, falling to her hands and knees, leap-frogging around, and urging him toward victory. When Orlando kneels before her and caresses her cheek, Celia must grab her by the arm and wrest her away. With the cheerfully naughty Celia at her side, she journeys into western Missouri in exile, and the wide-open expanse of untamed territory and sense of adventure seem to much better suit Rosalind personality and temperament. Rather than out of place and affected, Rosalind adapts and blends in naturally, seeming to have a great deal of fun with her strutting John Wayne impersonation complete with nasal twang, cockeyed cowboy hat, and straps of ammunition across her vest.
An impressive visual design features colorful gamblers and poker players at gaming tables, dance-hall girls in stockings, and an array of citizens bellied up to the bar at a big-city saloon. The gaucheness of color and rowdy noise contrast with the tumbleweed and boulder-strewn expanse of the West. Men wear blue jeans and boots with cowboy hats, the women simple gowns, and everyone speaks with a polite and pleasant drawl. Scenic backdrops of mountain vistas, green forests and open fields grace sliding panels that shift upstage to differentiate each scene. At the happy-ending conclusion, the panels come together like pieces from a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to form a unified panorama of prairie, woodland, and mountains.
Maggio enhances the production with on-stage musicians - a quintet with banjo, fiddle, bass, drums, and a variety of reeds - playing an original western-style score of reels and waltzes as well as country-music sound effects and interludes. Touchstone turns out to be an accomplished crooner, and the handful of original songs - including "sweet lovers love the spring" - suit the scenic and costume designs quite well. The concluding scene with the sudden appearance of the goddess Hymen is wisely excised, with the godly visitation cleverly replaced by a country church hymn.
Supporting characters - including the aforementioned Touchstone - are colorfully drawn. Touchstone, a rotund Irish-American song and dance man peppering his songs with traditional Irish lyrics, wears an oversize Tom Mix-style hat with a floppy brim and a red-and-white rancher outfit. He appears at one juncture on the clapboard of a covered wagon, a new variation of American hustler bringing his vaudevillian entertainer skills to a dangerous new world. Jaques is played as a world-weary Virginian aristocrat, a deep-south one-armed Confederate army veteran with a sophisticated and lilting William Faulkner-like accent. And Steppenwolf Theatre veteran Rick Snyder portrays both Dukes, wearing a white tuxedo with bow tie and tails as the drunken city slicker Duke Frederick and doubling as the fur-clad cowboy Duke Senior out west. Duke Senior's men, cowboys wearing chaps and buffalo hide while wielding long rifles, are dignified country gentlemen gathered in a friendly group around a campfire. When city-boy Orlando desperately tries to rob them, they talk him out of it, and he stammers that he thought "all things had been savage here."
Not all of Maggio's concepts work well. LeBeau's outrageous French accent seems intended as comical but still plays as forced and out of place, and a late Native American dance sequence only confuses. A lone Indian dancer gives an apparently elegiac impressionistic dance for the court before the outdoor wedding ceremonies, but the onstage characters - with the notable exception of the perceptive and intelligent Jaques - ignore the miming dance that seems to mourn the deer killed by Duke Senior's hunters for the celebration. The suddenly broached theme regarding overexpansion and misuse of natural resources comes from nowhere and receives no further development.
But for the most part, Maggio's As You Like It skips along on its musical score and lush visual design. The romance manages some charming moments, with Rosalind forgetting herself as Ganymede and quickly lowering her voice register after a particularly emotional exchange with Orlando, or splashing him from an onstage creek to make him take his practice at wooing more seriously. After a kiss with Rosalind, Orlando struggles to gather himself, then blunders face first into a tree trunk before staggering offstage. And both of the heroines - Rosalind and Celia - take a shine to the physically and psychically wounded Jaques, Rosalind playfully splashing him from the creek and Celia teasing him as she kicks her feet in the water.
Maggio's conclusion, appropriately colorful and entertaining, arrives after Phoebe's attempt to kill Ganymede with a shotgun is thwarted by Silvius, who in turn attempts to use the weapon on himself. Rosalind delivers the epilogue with genuine grace, Orlando sitting with adoration at her feet, the full cast of seventeen smiling onstage.