Summary 
A handsome entertainment, expertly mounted in late 17700s colonial Maine, with a rotating two-story set and detailed period costumes. Original music and lyrics enhance and extend a simple and at times repetitive bedroom farce, but a grotesquely bloated old Falstaff and strong performances in supporting roles are quite often remarkable.
Design
Directed by Barbara Gaines. Set by James Noone. Costumes by Mariann Verheyen. Lights by Anne Militello. Sound by Lindsay Jones. Compositions by Alaric Jans.
Cast
Greg Vinkler (Falstaff), Matthew Krause (Nym), Scott Aiello (Pistol), Dan Kenney (Bardolph), Bernie Landis (Shallow), Don Forston (Evans), Andrew McGinn (Slender), Joel Hatch (Page), Kailey Bell (Anne Page), Lise Bruneau (Margaret Page), Ora Jones (Alice Ford), Lamar Lewis (Simple), Rob Riley (Host), Lusia Strus (Mistress Quickly), Scott Jaeck (Caius), Ross Lehman (Ford).
Analysis
Barbara Gaines' rousing update of The Merry Wives of Windsor is set in the colonial United States in the late 1700s, specifically the charming rural village of Windsor, Maine, nestled not near an English river but on the shores of Lobster Lake. A cut-away of a spacious two-story wooden home is marvelously detailed, spinning on a rotating turntable stage, a typically quaint old home in a middle-class village. The big house has an array of doorways and windows for quickly-paced entrances and exits and unseen observations. Elaborate costumes are from the period, Quaker-like garments of stark black and white - suits, vests and puffy-sleeved gowns - so the characters all resemble simple pilgrims in contrast to Greg Vinkler's grunting beast of a hairy Falstaff draped in an array of comparatively colorful rags.
Gaines approaches the at-times repetitious text and its slew of characters and machinations with the speed and silliness of a romantic bedroom comedy. Performers race up and down the aisles, burst from doorways and rush into rooms while slamming doors all across the stage in an attractively mounted frenzy. The production begins with an original song, the lyrics from Dante Gabriel Rosetti's poem "Sudden Light" - "I have been here before" - and Gaines laces the production with incidental music and more songs, some with additional lyrics penned by Cheri Coons. The atmosphere is enchanting, the performers expert, and Gaines directs the slapstick layers of plotting with elegant ease, but at three hours the story becomes repetitious and the musical interludes less enhance the story than simply slow it down and stretch it out.
Vinkler's Sir John Falstaff - with padding, more padding, then even more padding - is the enormous foil of all the plotting, a hemming-and-hawing, rotund fat man with long straggly hair that is curly and unkempt, a wild and heavy beard, and dancing pig-like eyes. Less a loveable old rascal or an irrepressible old intellectual than just a grotesque hedonist, Vinkler's scruffy Knight is a repulsive blowhard, swaggering for no apparent reason but out of complete delusion. He plots the double romance seduction of the Ford and Page wives with hearty bravado, then sags humiliated in abject defeat afterward - nearly drowned while covered in dirty underwear, then paddled while fleeing in the clothes of an old woman - and by 3.3 he sulks and broods within a steaming bubble bath, muttering sullenly, irascibly waving off the lusty Mistress Quickly. Vinkler's performance is quite good, rendering an ugly portrait of an egotistic glutton who is as physically unappealing as he is emotionally unsavory, but investing the character with some pathos and sympathy. Twice humiliated, often-insulted, and generally driven into submission, the hideous Sir John emerges as a pathetic old punching bag victimized by an entire town of practical jokers.
The supporting roles are smartly played and imbued with colonial northeast color, especially Ora Jones and Lise Bruneau as the two hometown housewives - given the Christian names of Alice and Margaret - who may feel somewhat bored and more than a little neglected, Doctor Caius and Mistress Quickly play as diametrical opposites, he an absurdly-accented French physician who unwittingly plays a key role, and she a Cockney-inflected curly-orange-wigged Brit servant wench whose machinations drive the entire play. Best among them is Ross Lehmann's hyper-jealous Ford - in a seething bluster - who by turns seems resolute and confident then so shaken his emotional wheels appear to be about to come off.
Gaines' conclusion occurs in the brilliantly semi-lit darkness of the autumn woods of Maine, the villagers wearing gorgeously detailed sprite-fairy costumes and delighting in the cruel humiliation of Falstaff yet again. A handsome and expertly crafted production that would have been exceptional if trimmed, Shakespeare's laborious story stream-lined and perhaps simplified, but the show thoroughly entertains, even extended by the musical interludes to three hours in length.