As You Like It (2017)
Opening Night: September 28, 2017
Closing: October 22, 2017
Theater: Classic Stage Comp.
CSC Artistic Director John Doyle and Tony Award-winning composer Stephen Schwartz bring Shakespeare’s pastoral romance–with its lovers in disguise, troubadours in trouble, and some of Shakespeare’s most beloved characters–to life in this transporting production.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
September 28, 2017
The maximalism of musical theater is often a good match for John Doyle’s knife. In pared-back stagings of “Sweeney Todd” and “The Color Purple,” to name just two, he has shown us what is essential by removing everything that isn’t.
You might think that this technique, or perhaps it is more of a worldview, would prove just as illuminating when applied to Shakespeare, that most musical of playwrights. But to judge from Mr. Doyle’s take on “As You Like It,” which opened on Thursday evening at Classic Stage Company, the approach has its limits. This production, Mr. Doyle’s first Shakespeare in New York, is so cut down it has bled out.
I don’t just mean that it is short, though about a third of the text is gone; at 100 minutes it is still 10 minutes longer than the joyful version presented earlier this month by the Public Theater in Central Park. And that one was a musical with a cast of 189.
READ THE REVIEW