If there were as much justice and wisdom in the New York theater as there is folly and waste, then some thoughtful, hip, clout-wielding representative from one of the city’s great institutional theaters would take the time to go see what is surely the most captivating and instructive homegrown Shakespeare this town has seen since the death of Joe Papp. It’s Moonwork’s wildly insouciant adaptation of Twelfth Night (at the Connelly Theater, way over on E. 4th St.), which takes such liberties with the idea of “text” that the creators are presenting it under the play’s rarely heard subtitle, What You Will.
For years I’ve been hearing about the annual Shakespeare production of this little company of multi-talented writer-performers (brothers Gregory and James Wolfe, Mason Pettit and Kathy Keane). More than once I’ve been to the group’s Saturday night “Original Works” series and admired the scope and variety of talent on tap. And I’d heard the CD from their A Midsummer Night’s Dream a couple of years back, which was what made me swear not to miss another one of their Shakespeares. These are conceived and directed by Gregory Wolfe, and famous for playing fast and loose with the script of a play as it has come down to us. (Clearly the words “quarto” and “folio” hold no terror for this man.) That said, Moonwork productions are also famous for running roughshod over texts in a manner that bolsters their moral intent rather than working against it, as so much “innovative” Shakespeare is wont to do.
The current production is set at a West Coast nightclub during World War II. It’s filled with sailors (they’re all dressed alike; get it?), one of whom Viola beanbags, in an early interpolated sequence, and drags offstage with obvious designs on his clothes. Olivia (Margaret Nichols), the club owner, has a little upstairs office with a Juliet balcony on which a spotlight is trained whenever she feels like stepping up to the mic. Malvolio (Jason Cicci) is the maitre d’, Maria (Julie Dingman) a cocktail waitress. Orsino (Mason Pettit) is a naval officer who frequents the place.
Feste (Rusty Magee) is the house piano-player—in a certain sense the prime mover. In this version of the play, which high-handedly transposes the famous opening speech, transforming it into a Tony Bennett–style ballad that Orsino writes and croons to Feste’s accompaniment, music is not only the food of love but the main conceit.
Nearly every problematic element in the play—problematic in the sense of difficult to bring off, either because it is too familiar or too obscure—is recast as a showbiz routine, improvised or rehearsed. We are, in fact, in a sort of quasi-backstage musical in which the traditional dual world that defines Shakespeare’s comedies is expressed in terms of on- and offstage. What’s ideal-fantastical in the idea of Illyria becomes good or bad showmanship depending on the taste and ability of the character who’s putting it on offer.
Thus, in the early battle of wits where Feste proves Olivia “a fool” for continuing to mourn her brother, he sits down at the piano and ostentatiously improvises a boogie-woogie number, “Take Away the Fool.” (This is good showmanship.) Orsino overplays his stuff. (That’s poor showmanship.) Later, his pompous love declaration is set as a baroque fanfare. (Poor showmanship again.)
Purists and pedants will have issues with this sort of thing. Wolfe’s conceit is hard on some of the most widely taught and understood traditions of Shakespearean comedy: the notion of two antithetical worlds that the characters inhabit, the idea of self-limiting action. Olivia is one of those characters—like Angelo in Measure for Measure or the celibate men in Love’s Labour’s Lost—who have cut themselves off from a particular kind of human experience. It’s perhaps fair to wonder what Orsino is doing in Olivia’s club, and what she’s doing running a nightclub at all, if she’s so removed from the world.
I’m inclined to argue that Wolfe’s conceit keeps faith with the dramatic and theatrical ethos of the play. Olivia needn’t be perpetually alone (the text shows her playful and gregarious) so long as she’s aloof. (Here she’s not only aloof but occasionally aloft.) Similarly, it’s less important that Orsino be kept away from Olivia than that he be blind to Viola, unable to see her for what she is, a point rather nicely underscored here by establishing that he has encountered Viola before and still doesn’t recognize her. In this version Orsino and the sea captain who rescues Viola are one and the same.
From the surprise opening—a Citizen Kane–style newsreel in which people are always posing for the camera—to the curtain call/finale, the adaptation is steeped in the idea of show business. At the far right of Lowell Pettit’s charming pastel deco set is a little white upright, like a ship’s wheel, watched over and largely manned by Magee, a sort of latter-day Hoagy Carmichael. Magee cowrote the music with Andrew Sherman, and musical-directed, which may here have entailed piano lessons, given the astonishing number of cast members who take over the keyboard at various points. The self-deprecating ain’t-I-a-babe speech that Olivia makes is cast here as a too-bright, too-chirpy show tune (“Two Lips Indifferent Red”), which she belts out wryly, accompanying herself on the piano. Later, to musically illustrate the point that Maria can imitate Olivia’s handwriting, she does a more-than-passable cover of the song, while Feste and Sirs Toby and Andrew (Ron McClary and Tom Shillue) look on approvingly. (Very good showmanship.)
The score is mostly ironic, and mostly about pop culture references. Viola’s “Make me a willow cabin at your gate” becomes a dream ballet, an Astaire-Rogers pas de deux that she dances with Orsino. A no-longer-intelligible bit of Elizabethan buffoonery (“Hold thy peace, thou knave”) starts out a canon and morphs into barbershop. Act II kicks off with a huge, all-out swing number, with a spotlit Olivia (her mourning black perked up with gold lamé) singing, “Hey, ho, the wind and the rain.” There’s even a slapstick boxing bout that Magee scores with silent-movie music. Malvolio’s humiliation takes the form of a garish production number he puts together. It’s all hugely funny and totally apt. One of the high points is an Ink Spots version of “O Mistress Mine,” which Toby and Andrew back up with doo-wop vocals.
Close students of adaptation may find themselves pondering the metaphysical status of one or two numbers toward the end in which characters seem to lapse into an hors-de-quotation-mark kind of singing—numbers that really seem to be or to think they are musical-theater, not a reference to it. And there are one or two performances that may perhaps seem to some a little Yale Drama School. But these are small points—the sorts of thing you argue about over the house brew ( Sam Adams) or in the taxi home. The key point is that this is so much the brand of Shakespeare that New York needs to see: one that uses American icons and idioms ingeniously, not to undercut or distract from the play, but to enlighten and entertain.