6/13
 |
| Sam Gibbs and Pastor Bob |
Last
Saturday night, our friend Sam Gibbs produced a Shakepeare’s Birthday Afterparty Sonnet Remix that was a true
artistic success. ( We will be featuring a story on that soon…) To know Sam’s
work better, we invited our friend Eli Y. Jack,(http://west-parkpress.blogspot.com/2015/04/guest-blog-owls-are-not-what-they-seem.html) who Pastor Brashear persuaded
to venture out to Brooklyn with him, to reflect on Sam’s recent production of As You Like It with his fledgling Stairwell Theatre Company.
AS YOU
LIKE IT by the Stairwell Theatre Company
(Hitting the like button…)
On a
beautiful late May afternoon, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Music Pagoda was the
perfect place to see the Stairwell Theatre Company’s production of As You Like It. This was also a great
way to begin New York City’s annual Shakespeare in the (every) Park season when almost every night you can find live
Shakespeare in a park near you.
The first
test of any Shakespeare production is language, and as directed by Sam Gibbs,
Stairwell met that challenge. (As they had in their premiere production of Cymbeline at West-Park.)There was no adjustment period so typical of these
productions, where the audience has to attune their ear to the rhythm and flow
of Shakespeare. From the start, the cast handled the language in a way that
sounded easy and natural and immediately comprehensible. Everything else
follows from there.
For
AYLI, you also need strong support in secondary characters like the melancholy
Jaques and the motley fool Touchstone. One always holds their breath waiting
for the all the world’s a stage soliloquy and Theodore Caywood, in the
midst of the audience, delivered, once again with a natural sense that these
words were coming to him in the moment, fresh and new, not like a well
rehearsed dramatic aria. Devin Doyle brought both a feeling of mischief and
wisdom to his Touchstone.
Gibbs’
8 member cast was uniformly solid while doubling, tripling and even quadrupling
roles. This juggling of roles, cleverly divided, led to some breathless
anticipation of what would happen which was rewarded in a way that felt amusing
but not distracting in the last scene. Ariana Karp was commanding as the dukes. Su
Thomas Hendrickson made her two women distinctly different characters as the
ingénue Rosalind and the earthy Audrey. Ellen Heald in the sidekick Celia role
and the shepherdess Phoebe had equal success. And to Gibbs credit, his country
characters never fell into the Hee haw
place that always shows lack of directorial effort.
Andrew
Colford, Leighton Samuels and director Gibbs himself all carried their multiple
roles well. Samuels playing Sir Oliver Martext as a rabbi complete with a mazel tov
glass
breaking moment was a nice touch.
The
Pagoda setting was used well with action taking place in front of, in back of
and in the middle of the audience. The lawn in front of the stage was well used
with no lines lost by distance. And having the audience write love notes to be
posted on the trees was engaging without being overcute. The same economy used
in casting was also evident in costuming and other production values as simple
but not cheap.
And a
very special asset to both Stairwell productions I have seen is the original
music created by Matthew Gibbs.
Prospect
Park with its own carousel, picnic grounds and winding pathways is what Sunday
afternoons are made for. I’ve seen AYLI’s
light and AYLI’s dark with a brooding
Touchstone and the ….rain that raineth
everyday…This Stairwell was bright, breezy and warm as a sunny May
afternoon in the park.
No comments:
Post a Comment