The Bard Visits the Nixon Era With ‘As You Like It’

From the set alone--painted in psychedelic swirls in the style of Peter Max--it’s immediately apparent that director Louis Fantasia has more than Shakespeare on his mind in his Nixon-era resetting of “As You Like It” at the Tracy Roberts Studio Theatre.

Enormous attention to detail brings some very funny staging to this flashback of a production, starting with Don Paul’s hunched-shouldered, sweaty-lipped, shifty-eyed portrait of the Tricky Duke himself. The play’s numerous snippets of song are delivered in a perfect Bob Dylan-esque nasal whine by a guitar-strummin’, harmonica-blowin’ folk singer (Aaron Angello). And Morrison Jackson’s costumes are a side-splitting descent from one bell-bottomed, tie-dyed horror to the next as the characters shed their stiff conformity under the countercultural eaves of Arden forest.

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But there’s the rub--for all its clever execution, the conceit often comes at the expense of the text. Shakespeare’s bucolic comedy extolled the virtues of the forest as a place of healing and wholeness, an antidote to the neurosis of city life. Yet here, the agrarian lifestyle adopted by the city dropouts becomes just as much an object of derision as the square existence they’ve left behind. At times, even Shakespeare’s plot seems like an obligatory distraction from the real satirical energy of the piece.

A large cast spans an uneven gamut, but at the more effective end are Marguerite MacIntyre as the banished Rosalind (though more convincing in her feminine incarnation than in her male disguise), Michele Greene as her loyal cousin, and Frank Collison as her exiled father. They manage to preserve the essence of their characters through the layers of embellishment. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Carey Eidel’s Touchstone, who relinquished the trickster’s rebellious edge for what appears to be a golfer’s retirement, or of Brian Rich, whose practically sunny disposition makes it hard for his melancholy Jaques to live up to the character’s reputation.

Though the effort scores its share of hits, a looser adaptation of Shakespeare as a thematic backdrop might have served better than attempting to shoehorn a formal staging into sandals.

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* “As You Like It,” Tracy Roberts Studio Theatre, 12265 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends June 28. $15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.