Summary 
Intellectual modernization to the 1920s expertly contrasts dictatorial European fascism against surreal art, lavishly staged with a surprisingly warm-hearted overtone. A jackbooted first-act military dictatorship falls to the natural emotion and artistic freedom of the second-act forest, represented with lively original music and culminating in a spirited swing-music celebration. At times fascinating, at other times obtuse, but always clever, an entertaining and superbly directed entertainment.
Design
Directed by Des McAnuff. Set by Debra Hanson. Costumes by Dana Osborne. Lights by Michael Walton. Compositions by Justin Ellington and Michael Roth. Musical direction by Michael Roth. Sound by Todd Charlton. Fights by Daniel Levinson.
Cast
Paul Nolan (Orlando), Brian Tree (Adam), Mike Shara (Oliver), Dan Chameroy (Charles/William), Cara Ricketts (Celia), Andrea Runge (Rosalind), Ben Carlson (Touchstone), Xuan Fraser (Le Beau), Tom Rooney (Duke Frederick/Duke Senior), Randy Hughson (Corin), Ian Lake (Silvius), Brent Carver (Jaques), Lucy Peacock (Audrey), Victor Ertmantis (Oliver Martext), Dalal Badr (Phoebe), Roy Lewis (Hymen).
Analysis
Des McAnuff's As You Like It on the main stage at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is a colorfully staged but overtly intellectual near-masterpiece, presented on a stage covered in flowing crimson silk under four white globes on golden pedestals. Towering plexiglass panels flank a red-curtained entrance upstage, and suspended from the fly are a large mechanical clockworks and Fascist golden eagle wings. McAnuff sets the production in the late 1920s, and black-clad SS-like military police officers enter before the show begins to observe the audience. They stand silently, almost menacingly, like agents of Orwell's Big Brother, arms folded behind their backs, capped and wearing side arms. Two of the guards have their faces covered with gauze, appearing less human and more ghastly and ghostly, and they continue to watch in silence as ominous music plays and indistinct public service announcements echo in the background.
McAnuff begins with a languidly paced 1.1, as Brian Tree's gray-haired Adam, a hunched old man in suspenders and fingerless gloves, struggles to lift black rocks and haul them to a wheelbarrow. His labor seems Sisyphian, and the scene adds to his already sympathetic character - he rests against the wheelbarrow and wags a scolding finger at a particularly heavy stone - as it does to the curly-haired Orlando, who quickly loads the wheelbarrow while Adam nibbles at a sandwich. Orlando, tall and lean in a denim jacket, defies his big-city big-business big brother, Oliver, who wears a vested suit and carries a briefcase. The slick-haired Oliver shows impatience and slaps Orlando, and the two exchange punches until Orlando wrestles him to the ground and subdues him with a headlock. Tree's Adam prevents Orlando from murdering Oliver with a heavy rock, but Oliver does not notice, and he insults Adam - "get you with him, you old dog" - before the stage darkens and he reveals his own murderous plot from within a spotlight. Oliver brings in the wrestler Charles, a soldier in a mustard-yellow dress shirt under a black military coat, and gloats - "now will I stir this gamester" - as they drink brandy from snifters.
McAnuff presents his protagonist Rosalind 1.2 as a tall and graceful artist, a painter of surrealistic portraits and still lifes, wearing a white smock and wielding a brush and palette. Andrea Runge plays Rosalind with a shimmering elegance that contrasts with the gritty urbane wit of Celia. Celia, in fur over a dress with pearls, embraces her friend - "when I break that oath, let me turn monster" - then touches up Rosalind's makeup after adjusting her own in a compact mirror. They flirt with the stylish pin-striped Touchstone, each giving an "ooh!" and taking him by the arm as Rosalind swipes the cherry from his Cosmopolitan martini glass. The trio present the only benevolent element within McAnuff's nightmarish military state, as evidenced by the sudden dramatic music as soldiers roll out a large circular black mat for the wrestling match and the arrival of a disturbingly dictatorial Duke Frederick. Wearing an SS officer's uniform, he is balding with a Hitler mustache, an angry despot standing beneath an umbrella held by a soldier. After the heroic Orlando reveals some existentialism - "in the world I fill up a place" - he quickly dispatches Charles with a kick to the head followed by a scissor-kick for a pin, leaving Rosalind and Celia applauding in delight. Orlando receives the Duke's praise - "thou art a gallant youth" - as Charles is given smelling salts and helped to walk away, but does not seem surprised by the Duke's anger at his parentage. He accepts Rosalind's necklace, staring into her eyes - "my better parts are all thrown down" - as she circles him, and he finds he can only smile and say nothing until she has exited: "o poor Orlando, thou art overthrown!"
McAnuff builds to the pivotal 1.3 exiles with creative imagery. Celia and Runge's Rosalind luxuriate wearing just cotton bath towels within a steam bath, the globes spewing stage fog, their chairs a white plastic art deco style in Dali-twisted shapes with metal bottoms. When the Duke storms in with ten armed soldiers, the women are given bath robes as the globes around them light up and spin. Celia defends Rosalind - "if she be a traitor, why so am I" - but the Duke must stop himself from backhanding her across the face, and the two friends emotionally embrace - "to liberty!" - as the mechanical hands begin to spin on the suspended timepiece. When the ladies escape moments later it is with the aid of a female soldier, but the sympathetic guard is summarily arrested and propelled offstage in an arm lock by an eye-patched SS officer. Similarly, Adam reveals to Orlando an escape route with a flashlight cutting through the darkness - "this house is but a butchery" - but when he drops to his knees to offer his master his meager life savings, Orlando whisks him offstage to safety within the wheelbarrow. Moments later, soldiers arrive amid the sound effect of barking dogs, and Oliver is shown captured and brutalized, then dragged to the Duke.
The Forest of Arden, in McAnuff's production representing intellectual freedom and political oasis as well as rural redemption, is strikingly realized 2.4, with the red silk expanse drawn slowly into a center stage trap as music rises. The stage is colorfully lacquered with bright-winged butterflies - swimming fish appear upon the steps leading up - against verdant green. A single barren forest tree can be seen upstage, and late autumn leaves fall behind the plexiglass, while Touchstone in his overcoat and wingtips enters stage right, struggling with five luggage bags, an easel dangling across his back. Rosalind appears behind him dressed as the boyish Ganymede, but Celia - always urbane in hat and stole with high heels - crawls onstage on her hands and knees and collapses into a sprawl, sliding down a ramp to the stage. After Celia's melodramatic hunger pangs, the exiled threesome wonder at the dimwitted Silvius - "Phoebe! Phoebe! Phoebe!" - staggering offstage in the melodramatic throes of unrequited passion.
Tom Rooney doubles as Duke Senior, his exiled Duke a warm but soft-spoken leader of the 2.1 "brothers in exile," a benevolent opposite to his Hitler-like counterpart, Duke Frederick. The banished Duke appears within the audience to a whistling wind sound effect, his followers scattered among the seats, carrying rifles and clad in long woolen coats and hats. They move to the stage hauling carcasses and animal skins upon poles as well as baskets of fruits and vegetables, and one hunter carries binoculars and another a bow and quiver. They gather amiably onstage for their defining songs, played with rich 1920s-style original music on guitar, saxophone, trumpet, bass, fiddles, and a baby grand piano. The merry band features a pair of strong singers, especially Amiens with a bull horn he also uses as a dunce's cap. Their camaraderie is rousing as they sing - "here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather" - while a young boy ice fishes upstage center.
Among the exiled Duke's followers is Brent Carver's enigmatic Jaques, a despondent but not bitter big-city sophisticate in black overcoat, black shoes, black vest, and a black bowler much like Rene Magritte's surreal but faceless Man in the Bowler Hat. Carver's Jaques embodies the surreal movement's sense of lost identity in his inky cloak and wry observations - "I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs" - but is portrayed as a displaced city dweller with far more sympathetic melancholy than acerbic sarcasm. McAnuff slows the pace to a comfortable crawl with Carver's almost shell-shocked Jaques - "come, warble" - exploring urban philosophy with leisurely ease, the gloomy clown a delight in playing plaintive piano notes as he defines a ducdame as "a Greek invocation to call fools into a circle" for the men gathered around him. When Orlando arrives with Adam - responding to his "I die for food" with "live a little!" - he has the old man wrapped in his coat and bundled within his arms, a heavy snowfall visible beyond the plexiglass upstage. Carver's Jaques comments on the knife-wielding desperation of Orlando - "I met a fool" - as an enormous green apple descends from the fly, and while the Duke's merry men - "we have seen better days" - gather baskets of apples and trays of roasted game meat to care for old Adam, Carver's Jaques seizes the opportunity to expound on the Seven Ages of Man. Carver's delivery is intellectual and articulate but heartrendingly emotional, as he uses his half-bitten apple to portray a schoolboy, his umbrella for a gallant young lover, then the umbrella again as a rifle for a young man sent to war. Tears come into Jaques' eyes as he reaches the sixth age, his hand on the Duke's shoulder for support, his speech whistling between his teeth. The emotional moment lingers as lightning flashes and thunder rumbles, and Tree's Adam collapses onstage, his eyes rolling into the back of his head. The first interval is reached with the poignant power of Jaques' speech and Adam's passing, and the men remove their hats while Adam is wrapped within a blanket and lifted to their shoulders in a funeral procession. Orlando concludes the exceptional scene in near- darkness, standing center stage to scatter a fistful of dust over old Adam's grave.
McAnuff peppers the rural romances with overtly intellectual images from surreal painting. 3.2 is preceded with a posed upstage portrait of a man with a big smoking pipe, and before 3.3 he reappears, but with the head of a bison. The images seem to complement Ben Carlson's Touchstone, a worldly urban cynic exposed to rural culture all but against his will, although ultimately falling head over heels in passionate love with the simpleton goatherd Audrey. Carlson's Touchstone appears comically annoyed, squeezing his eyes shut at the bleats of sheep as he stands upstage with the shepherd Corin. He fails to defeat Corin's simple but effective philosophy - "a great cause of the night is lack of the sun" - and cannot take his eyes off the dopey Audrey in her unladylike poses and rubber boots. Carver's ever-curious Jaques rises from a center stage trap to observe from stage level - just face and bowler visible - Touchstone's wooing. Carlson's Touchstone invites Jaques to witness his wedding, presided over by an oddball Sir Oliver Martext, drinking from a flask while astride a school-bus-yellow scooter bicycle and wearing gloves, a flyer helmet, goggles, and a priest's collar. By 5.1, Touchstone is transformed, pursuing the stomping-mad Audrey, and he quickly dispatches the wordless wooer William, then drags Audrey by the hand to join in a jazzy musical free-for-all - "with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino!" - with live music from twin fiddles, a pair of trumpets, a guitar, a stand-up bass, and a ragtime piano. Touchstone and Audrey sway back and forth, seated upon the piano, and the exiled hunters dance with sideways leg kicks on an upstage ramp. In a bravura moment that thrills, Carlson's Touchstone leaps from the piano and takes over on the big bass, thumping out rhythms with passion, spinning the instrument and shouting for Audrey to dance. The band finishes with a flourish as Touchstone embraces and kisses Audrey then offers generous cash tips to the musicians.
A parallel romance is between Orlando and the disguised Rosalind, both unencumbered city folk loosed in magical forest, a la A Midsummer Night's Dream. Orlando, running riot 3.2 through the forest, tosses a love poem into the air but watches as it flutters from his hand to magically rise to the fly, then as dozens more appear upstage, fluttering behind the plexiglass panels. Celia and Rosalind read some of the love poems - Celia reciting a particularly cloying couplet from deep within the audience - and when she realizes Rosalind does not grasp that Orlando is the poet, she dances and cries, "wonderful!" Runge's radiant Rosalind become Orlando-like in her joie de vivre, peppering her friend with questions then "answer me in one word!" before lying on her back and covering her face with her hat: "I am a woman, when I think I must speak." Disguised (apparently) as Ganymede, she describes the "careful desolation" of love to the moon-eyed Orlando as Celia listens nearby, punctuating their conversation with eye rolls, sighs, frowns, pouts, retching motions, throwing her arms, and a grunted "ugh." Orlando endures an encounter with the sardonic Jaques - "let's meet as little as we can" - and is dubbed "good Signior Love." When he is tardy for his appointment in love 3.4, Celia sits and demurely knits, but with a scathing diagnosis: "his kisses are Judas's own children."
The third romance of As You Like It is the comic-relief pursuit by Silvius of the bare-legged Phoebe, played for carnal humor in McAnuff's production. Phoebe gives the dazed-eyed Silvius a sultry back rub and pulls his shirt off as she tells him about her passion for the uncaring Ganymede - "sell when you can: you are not for all markets" - not acknowledging that Silvius is as passionate - "sweet Phoebe, pity me" - for her. During 3.5 they sway in mock-copulation behind a big fuzzy sheep before Phoebe straddles the beast, then reaches for a post-orgasm cigarette that Silvius is quick to ignite with a lighter. McAnuff juxtaposes the silly albeit vulgar humor with the 4.1 arrival of female flora-like spirits in green and blue body suits and flower arrangements for heads. The artistic spirits seem to represent the transformation to rural freedom for Rosalind and Celia, the former painting upstage while the latter eats a banana. During the pretend marriage ceremony - "men are April when they woo, December when they wed" - Orlando seems startled at the softness of Ganymede's hand, and when they almost share a kiss he adopts a knowing expression that she concedes. When he departs, Rosalind spins her easel to present her new painting, a Magritte-like portrait of Orlando with his face a mass of green and white flowers, and the production pauses for a second interval. When the show resumes 4.3, Runge is at her best with an increasingly exasperated Rosalind - about Phoebe: "her love is not the hare I do hunt!" - swooning at Oliver's story about Orlando fighting a lioness, the tale enhanced and re-enacted upstage by a lithe dancer in a form-fitting female lion outfit with brown claws. When Rosalind finally faints, her fall goes unnoticed by Oliver and Celia, who share sexy glances and smiles in a comic flirtation.
The latter two thirds of McAnuff's production, and especially Shakespeare's contrived conclusion and triple - no, quadruple - wedding, is almost unrelentingly bright and cheerful. The only truly dark moment is a brief 3.1, with giant Big Brother eyeballs descending from the fly amid dramatic music. The sunglasses-wearing dictator Duke, still under an umbrella as Oliver is beaten center stage, pulls a Luger and executes Oliver's assistant Dennis with a loud pistol shot. The scene serves as a forbidding reminder of the urban peril looming nearby, but once Rosalind reappears 5.2 to make good on all her promises - three times, to each of the lovers, standing in a circle facing her - the 5.4 conclusion is entirely upbeat. The exiled Duke joins Orlando and Oliver, all three sporting cream linen tuxedoes for the wedding ceremony. Silvius takes Phoebe's hand, although she yanks it away and crosses her arms in a pout, and Carlson's Touchstone dazzles with his clever seven-ways-to-deceive speech, the number seven a recurring theme. Finally, when Rosalind appears as herself in a bridal dress, walking downstage along a long white ceremonial runner, the god Hymen appears as something of a jazz-era icon, wearing a white tuxedo with top hat. Hymen belts out another song - "then is there mirth in heaven" - as he couples all their hands together while they gather in a circle - another prominent McAnuff theme - around him. Even Carver's sad-eyed Jaques takes part in the revelry, seeking the opportunity to join the newly converted Duke Frederick - "to him will I" - and after a concluding song, flower petals drift lazily from the fly as the cast slowly exits upstage. Runge's Rosalind returns for her epilogue - "when I make curtsy, bid me farewell" - her performance as brightly intellectual and as warm-hearted as the entire production.