STAGE REVIEW : Bountiful ‘As You Like It’ Opens Old Globe Season

The Old Globe Theatre began its summer season with an end-of-summer staging of “As You Like It.”

Set in the alfresco Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, this “As You Like It” is bountiful, well-spoken and without major surprises--unless it’s the fact that the production’s overriding melancholy is underplayed in the one character, Jaques, where it’s most needed.

The hints of incipient autumn are established by David Jenkins’ set. In the first scene, the apples have been harvested and are being pressed into cider. The leaves are beginning to fall from the trees in the Forest of Arden. And then there is the matter of the deer.

Director Julianne Boyd and Jenkins were not content to simply let us hear Shakespeare’s lines about Jaques’ grief over a hunter’s wounding of a deer in the forest. In one of the first scenes, before we even enter the forest, Rosalind and Celia play badminton against the backdrop of a formal garden that includes a bush sculpted in the form of a stag.

As we near the end of the play, the banished duke’s merry men not only sing a bawdy little ditty in honor of the fellow who killed the deer, but they actually bear the creature’s headless corpse across the stage. The triumphant young hunter smears his hands and face with the deer’s blood. After the merry men go on their way, leaving the deer on stage, Jaques comes forward and touches the animal’s neck in a moment of silent sympathy.

This scene effectively ends the notion of the forest as the halcyon retreat that it might resemble in the spring. Instead, this is a bloody place, where the food chain continues operating, where even those men who claim to love nature don’t hesitate to exert their dominion over it. In this world, the faux deer (as sculpted in the garden) threatens to outlive the real thing.

Jaques more or less articulates this point of view throughout the play. But this production’s Jaques, Richard Kneeland, isn’t the right man to embody it. Kneeland speaks Jaques’ lines, including those about the seven ages of man, with grace and precision, but he doesn’t look particularly glum. His eyes don’t appear haunted. He carries himself with a bearing not much different from his stout-hearted comrades.

It’s a curious lapse in an otherwise well-cast staging. The magnificently wall-eyed Richard Easton is a superb Touchstone, suggesting the professional fool’s wit, his hauteur, his carnality. Robert Phalen plays both the bad duke and his brother, the banished good duke, with conviction. The physical resemblance between the dukes may help us swallow the bad duke’s sudden offstage conversion at the end of the play; they were cut of the same cloth, right? Well. . . .

Any “As You Like It” hinges on its Rosalind, and Jayne Atkinson is spirited enough to carry off the disguise as a man--observe the gymnastic workout she and Michel R. Gill’s Orlando go through during her speech about the volatile moods of married women--yet she is also feminine enough to make us see the studied aspect of her disguise. More important, in her private moments, we believe both her cynicism and her lovesickness. We see the anxiety behind her little charade: Will Orlando like her as she is? Will she like him? Will the real romance work out, or even be as much fun, as the fake one? With Gill’s Orlando, this is an open question. He’s perfectly handsome--too perfect, perhaps, for this Rosalind. There are no character lines on his face. He looks several years younger and several dimensions shallower than Atkinson’s Rosalind.

As Celia, Katherine Leask elicits many of the play’s chuckles, not only with her insinuating glances and artificial smiles during Rosalind’s byplay with Orlando, but even with the simple statement that she’s too tired to keep walking. The performances in the pastoral roles are also little comic gems: especially Pippa Pearthree as Phebe, Charley Lang as Silvius and M. Susan Peck as Audrey. Ed Hall’s Corin retains a degree of dignity in the face of the supercilious Touchstone; Jonathan McMurtry is the noble old Adam.

Jonathan Nichols fares as well as can be expected as the villainous brother who so thoroughly reforms. For his interrogation by the bad duke, the stage opens up and he’s escorted to and from his dungeon in a glare of light and a wave of smoke. In a punitive environment like this, his knavery isn’t hard to understand. The program sets the play in the 1630s, possibly suggesting Cromwellian repression to come.

The play’s other Oliver, an itinerant parson played by Nicholas Martin, gets more than his share of laughs with the assistance of a clever prop, and Martin’s lisping LeBeau gets his with the aid of an outlandish outfit devised by Robert Wojewodski.

The costumes are lush, Conrad Susa’s score is tuneful, and Peter Maradudin’s lights finally illuminate the forest behind the stage. In other words, this is “As You Like It” as most of us like it--but the image of that unfortunate deer will linger, bringing us back down to earth.

At the Simon Edison Centre in Balboa Park Tuesdays through Sundays at 8:30 p.m., through July 29. $24 to $27.50; (619) 239-2255.

‘AS YOU LIKE IT’

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Julianne Boyd. Sets by David Jenkins. Costumes by Robert Wojewodski. Lights by Peter Maradudin. Music by Conrad Susa. Sound by Jeff Ladman. Choreography by Bonnie Johnston. Speech consultant Tim Monich. Stage manager Douglas Pagliotti. With Robert Phalen, Eric Ferguson, Richard Kneeland, Nicholas Martin, Aldo Billingslea, Jonathan Nichols, Blaise Messinger, Michel R. Gill, Jonathan McMurtry, Triney Sandoval, Richard Easton, Ed Hall, Charley Lang, Bray Poor, Jayne Atkinson, Katherine Leask, Pippa Pearthree, M. Susan Peck, Mickey Hanley, Arthur Morton, Dennis Valleta, Mary Kay Wulf, Therese Walden.