As You Like It (2010)
Opening Night: January 26, 2010
Closing: March 13, 2010
Theater: BAM Harvey Theater
Following a critically acclaimed inaugural year, theater and Academy Award-winning film director Sam Mendes will again direct a transatlantic company of actors for the second season of The Bridge Project, a unique three-year series of co-productions by BAM, The Old Vic, and Neal Street Productions devoted to producing large-scale, classical theater for international audiences.
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January 27, 2010
The deep freeze enveloping New York and much of the rest of the country over the past month apparently extended all the way to Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. Biting cold at times threatens to smother the biting wit in Sam Mendes’s tough-minded, wintry new production of “As You Like It,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as the first show in the Bridge Project’s second season.
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January 26, 2010
A joint venture by BAM, the Old Vic and Neal Street to create a classical repertory company, the Bridge Project got off to a promising start last year with a solid double-bill of "The Cherry Orchard" and "The Winter’s Tale." However, with the inaugural offering of its second season, the ambitious three-year enterprise hits a snag. Director Sam Mendes establishes a mood of such pervasive gloom and ponderousness that when it comes time for merry reversal and romance, his laborious staging of "As You Like It" can’t quite shake off the pall.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 27, 2010
Like the plot of "As You Like It," which moves from winter to spring, the Bridge Project production of the classic at BAM goes from chilly to charming.
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January 27, 2010
Having an actress who can convincingly play a young man is just one of the hurdles that directors and theatergoers face in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and in Sam Mendes’ solid staging of the comedy that’s playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre, Juliet Rylance beautifully fits the bill.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 26, 2010
Has Jaques’s melancholy polluted the entire Forest of Arden? The first half of Sam Mendes’s new production of As You Like It, at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, does not take a turn for the verdant or the pastoral when the court invades the woods. What was monochromatic and violent in the castle is no less so outdoors, with suspicion, draining energy, and even – in one of the most startling moments – a death to remind that our problems don’t vanish just because our usual surroundings do. You have every reason to think, watching all this unfold, that Mendes has unleashed another razor-edged reconception that sucks the life and fun from one of Wiliam Shakespeare’s most characteristic comedies.
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