Twelfth Night – Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York

Picture: Joan Marcus

Twelfth Night continues at the Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York until 19 August 2018.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Up-and-coming songwriter-performer Shaina Taub has transformed Twelfth Night into a Broadway-worthy musical comedy. It’s not transcendent Shakespeare but it’s a sturdy chunk of entertainment. And as produced by The Public Theater’s Public Works programme as part of the summertime Shakespeare in the Park season in New York’s Central Park, it becomes a joyful community celebration as well.

The Public Works programme, started by The Public in 2012, reaches out to neighbourhood groups around the city to get them involved in the process of theatre-making, doing away with any notion that theatre is an elitist enterprise. It develops adaptations of mostly Shakespeare’s plays mixing the citizenry with professionals, and at the end of the Shakespeare in the Park season, a production has taken over the stage for a few performances.

The Twelfth Night redo, conceived by Taub and Kwame Kwei-Armah, premiered in 2016. Kwei-Armah also directed. Now, the redo has been further redone and been given a full five-week run.

Director credit is being shared by Oskar Eustis, The Public’s artistic director, and Kwei-Armah, who now is busy with other duties as well, as the incoming artistic director of London’s Young Vic. And not so coincidentally, Kwei-Armah, as reported earlier in Musical Theatre Review, is starting his tenure at Young Vic this fall with a production of this Twelfth Night, sharing director credit with Eustis.

Twelfth Night in Central Park utilises a small army of some 100 non-professionals to augment the principals bringing Shakespeare’s story to life in playful contemporary terms. The non-pros are divided into two ensembles, getting on stage on alternate evenings. Whatever difficulties such logistics may present, they’re hardly evident in a seamless production that bubbles over with happy feelings.

Taub’s hefty score has a bright bouncy feel, with vaudeville-like character songs intermingled with soul-tinged ballads. There’s also more than a nod to a vintage showtune feel.

Her lyrics – as well as her dialogue – take off on Shakespeare’s poetry but then move into present-day wordsmithing, which dominates.

The opening number has Feste, Shakespeare’s clown, turned into a town square busker and portrayed by none other than the effervescent, multitasking Taub (she also plays keyboard with the onstage band, which she co-conducts), singing out with a chorus of townspeople: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Feste goes on to advise: “If you’re feeling blue/Baby, all you gotta do/Is take the song from the top.”

Orsino (Ato Blankson-Wood), the Duke who’s smitten with the Countess Olivia (Nanya-Akuki Goodrich), sums up his predicament in a jazzy refrain: “The lady won’t love me back/No, no, the lady won’t love me back…”

So, as you might remember, Orsino hires the new-in-town Viola to act as a go-between and win over the disinterested Olivia. The problem is that Viola, the survivor of a shipwreck that presumably took her twin brother’s life, has disguised herself as a young man to make her way in these strange surroundings. She looks so fine in her manly drag that Olivia falls for her on sight.

Nikki M. James, a Tony Award winner for The Book of Mormon, makes an appealing Viola, diminutive in size and big in voice and finding the laughs and the poignancy in all the gender confusion that frolics through the proceedings.

Viola’s male costuming, a smartly fitted dark gray suit that makes her look like a young diplomat, underscores the perplexities she feels about the robust Olivia’s advances and her own increasingly amorous inclinations toward the romantic Orsino. Her look is also an effective contrast against the colorful contemporary street clothes worn by most others in the cast.

The costumes are by Andrea Hood. They’re shown off nicely against the palatial look of the exterior of Olivia’s house, which dominates Rachel Hauck’s set design, along with natural flora of the Central Park surroundings.

The laughs get broad with the inhabitants of Olivia’s household: the roguish and contentedly tipsy Toby Belch, played with noisy ebullience by Shuler Hensley; Maria, Olivia’s maid and Toby’s main squeeze, played by Lori Brown-Niang; and Sir Andrew, a hapless suitor for Olivia, played by Daniel Hall.

Most prominently, there’s Olivia’s officious and puritanical steward, Malvolio, embodied with all the proper officiousness by Andrew Kober. The stuffy demeanour turns into giddiness, however, when he’s tricked into believing that he’s the object of Olivia’s affection. It’s a moment that leads into the show’s most showbiz-blatant production number, as the ensemble joins Kober with top hats and soft shoe in fantasising about his life as Olivia’s hubby.

Here and elsewhere in the show, Lorin Latarro’s choreography is pretty basic hip-hop, but to see it performed in unison by a legion of some 50 enthusiastic folks of all ages, shapes and sizes, is pretty impressive. So, it’s hats off to all these game citizens, as I’m sure Londoners will be tipping theirs when Twelfth Night hits the Young Vic.

       Ron Cohen