“If music be the food of love, play on*—the best known line of Twelfth Night — couldn’t be more appropriate for Director Jonathan Epstein’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s deliciously sweet and tart comedy. Daniel Levy’s original music enlivens throughout, whether sung or used for underscoring and scene transitions. How lovely to have a cast of singing and instrumentalist student actors!
Jerald Wheat is a regal Duke Orsino of Illyria, who’s doting on love for Olivia, now in seclusion, mourning her dead brother. Erin O’Connor’s Viola has just arrived from a shipwreck that’s separated her from her brother Sebastian. She decides to go to court but, for safety, as a boy. We get a hasty glimpse of the two dressed and looking alike. Of course, Orsino will take in favored “boy” Viola, now called Cesario, who will take a jewel, the Duke’s love token, to Olivia. She (Imani Lee Williams, gorgeous and desirable) aristocratically refuses Orsino but falls in love almost at first sight with Viola/Cesario and sends her a jeweled flirtation.
Olivia’s sly servant Maria (fetching Dreaa Kay Baudy) plots to disparage Olivia’s manager Malvolia, a Puritanical, secret lesbian who loves her (Zoya Martin, rightly imperious). Maria will get her wastrel aristocratic pals Sir Toby Belch (Christian Douglass as Olivia’s stupid uncle) and Joe Ayers’s loopy Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whom the other two have persuaded would be Olivia’s welcome suitor, to trick and punish Malvolia. (Neither Sir looks old enough, though.)
Maria forges a letter to Malvolia that gets her to act and dress like a fool before her loved mistress. Her punishment of being berated, imprisoned, and, in this adaptation, “outed,” brings a modern sensitivity to Zoya Martin’s performance.
Of course, Viola’s Cesario gets involved in all the shenanigans. She’s mistaken for Sebastian who was given some money by seaman Antonio (Peter S. Raymondo, believable). He’s been captured and needs it back. So “Cesario” needs to satisfy Antonio as well as fight with Sir Toby actually and Andrew metaphorically. No one ever needed a brother more than Viola, if love can’t work out like a good musical score.
We’re lucky to enjoy a polished interpreter like Erin O”Connor in this lead role. Throughout, action and comment in words and music come out of Shakespeare’s great clown Festa (Macaria Chaparro Martinez, who doesn’t ever disappoint). Here Festa has an ally in the clown Vesta (always effective Sydney Story). Shakespeare gave the clowns some of his best poetic lyrics, though we may not recognize them in all the to-do of this production. What keeps us wondering is how Viola is going to get out of her situation. Up to now, she is the one in on the most important plot secrets -- and now even she doesn’t know the ending revelations.
Everything takes place on a set of a white floor with filmed background of sky, changing colors with time and weather. The stage holds at start and finish six tree boards that can be grouped, isolated, and moved on and off. A square grouping of these tree boards makes up Malvolia’s tight prison with dark lighting inside and on the trees. Lighting is quite varied throughout, including at times giving the trees an appearance of being lit up for a pattern or special effect. Sound is like a character in the play…always on.
An especially tasteful ingredient of this performance is the actors’ clear speech. No trying to emulate some imagined standard British accents. And the costuming is like a fine dessert.
