2008 Woodie Awards
Play on: M&B bring the music of Twelfth Night to campus
Shakespeare's comedy delights anew
Chris Boucher
Issue date: 4/2/03 Section: Arts and Entertainment
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by Chris Boucher
Every year brings a new production of one of Shakespeare’s great plays to a college campus. People flock to hear the classic words, the legendary characters, the unforgettable music-
Music?
Contrary to many of the productions that students are exposed to, the bard’s plays are bursting with songs and musical references. By giving full weight to this little-explored aspect, Mask and Bauble’s production of Twelfth Night, showing at Poulton Hall this weekend and next, is a terrific example of how to stage a creative adaptation of Shakespeare without re-writing him. The production makes no attempt to “contemporize” the settings or the themes. Instead, faculty director Maya Roth has come as close as one can to recreating the environment of the Globe Theater here on campus. A simple row of arches lines the back of the stage, giving the actors a great deal of space to act out the sometimes wild comedy that this play entails.
This is not a dour tale of royal revenge. Twelfth Night contains some of the looniest and cleverest characters that Shakespeare devised for the stage. In what at first seems like a simple tale of mistaken identity, cross-dressing and practical jokes, all the extremes of the experience of love are explored. The major players in the cast do an outstanding job of finding the humanity within the screwball comedy characters they inhabit. Chris Hajduk (COL ‘04), as the too much in love Duke Orsino, exudes both majesty and sensitivity in a role filled with contradictions over the nature of love. His female counter part Olivia, played by Diana Cherkis (MSB ‘03), has both the mystery that an unattainable love object should have, and also the confusion over the nature of her own feelings that connects her to the audience.
Between them is the play’s female heroine Viola, a difficult part handled extremely well by Sarah Krokey (COL ‘06). It’s not easy to express the feelings of a girl playing a boy in love with a man who is in love with the woman who is in love with you. She strikes the right note of hidden longing mixed with bemused detachment as she watches the lunatics take over the asylum. Fortunately, those lunatics have some of the funniest scenes that Shakespeare ever wrote.
Every year brings a new production of one of Shakespeare’s great plays to a college campus. People flock to hear the classic words, the legendary characters, the unforgettable music-
Music?
Contrary to many of the productions that students are exposed to, the bard’s plays are bursting with songs and musical references. By giving full weight to this little-explored aspect, Mask and Bauble’s production of Twelfth Night, showing at Poulton Hall this weekend and next, is a terrific example of how to stage a creative adaptation of Shakespeare without re-writing him. The production makes no attempt to “contemporize” the settings or the themes. Instead, faculty director Maya Roth has come as close as one can to recreating the environment of the Globe Theater here on campus. A simple row of arches lines the back of the stage, giving the actors a great deal of space to act out the sometimes wild comedy that this play entails.
This is not a dour tale of royal revenge. Twelfth Night contains some of the looniest and cleverest characters that Shakespeare devised for the stage. In what at first seems like a simple tale of mistaken identity, cross-dressing and practical jokes, all the extremes of the experience of love are explored. The major players in the cast do an outstanding job of finding the humanity within the screwball comedy characters they inhabit. Chris Hajduk (COL ‘04), as the too much in love Duke Orsino, exudes both majesty and sensitivity in a role filled with contradictions over the nature of love. His female counter part Olivia, played by Diana Cherkis (MSB ‘03), has both the mystery that an unattainable love object should have, and also the confusion over the nature of her own feelings that connects her to the audience.
Between them is the play’s female heroine Viola, a difficult part handled extremely well by Sarah Krokey (COL ‘06). It’s not easy to express the feelings of a girl playing a boy in love with a man who is in love with the woman who is in love with you. She strikes the right note of hidden longing mixed with bemused detachment as she watches the lunatics take over the asylum. Fortunately, those lunatics have some of the funniest scenes that Shakespeare ever wrote.