Love's Labour's Lost is one of Shakespeare's earliest comedies and one of his least fascinating. It starts strongly enough, with the King of Navarre and three friends all swearing off women for three years in favor of the contemplative life. But before the first act is over, the Princess of France and her three ladies arrive, immediately prompting the men to want to break their vows. Since each female spontaneously chooses precisely the man who chooses her, there's no suspense about who will pair off at play's end. And because the would-be lovers never face any serious obstacles, there's not the least bit of mystery as to where the play's going.
All of these problems are compounded by a subplot that must have been timely in 1590 but couldn't be more irrelevant to modern audiences: the verbal hijinks of two word-infatuated pedants, Armado and Holofernes, whom some scholars think are based on Sir Walter Raleigh and the Renaissance scholar John Florio. Add a mildly pertinent clown and a not-terribly-pertinent pageant of historical figures, and you've got a real problem for a director: how to turn one of the Bard's decidedly lesser works into a satisfying, meaningful experience for a modern audience.
Unfortunately, American Stage director Kenneth Noel Mitchell fails to solve this pesky problem in his staging of Love's Labour's Lost, currently playing at Demens Landing as this year's Shakespeare in the Park offering. Mitchell's solution is, fundamentally, to make a campy, silly spectacle of the play at the expense of any reality that might make us care about these lovestruck or wordstruck characters. Broad, farcical behavior, big gestures and cartoon-like characterizations remind us constantly that we're supposed to be laughing, and make it all the more troubling that, most often, we're not.
Holofernes has been cut, but Armado remains as a lisping, pathetic buffoon whose wordplay is more often mystifying than illuminating. And Toni L. Wright's costumes are so unrealistically emblematic (the king's three friends in a striped coat, an artist's beret, and a Scottish kilt) that we can't help but feel distanced from anything genuine that the characters might embody. All good comedy is essentially serious (for example, the meditation on love that is A Midsummer Night's Dream), but this Love's Labour's Lost wants to be ludicrous inside and out. It's an unwise approach, leaving us unenlightened — and unamused.
The problem is certainly not with the acting. In fact, the performances in Love's Labour's Lost are almost entirely of top quality; it's only in what the actors have been asked to do that the production falters. Rob Addison convincingly plays the King of Navarre as a kind of middle-aged nerd, and Becca McCoy's Princess of France persuasively resembles a grade-school teacher unused to matters of the heart. Tom Delling as Berowne doesn't seem to be a Scotsman but does lend a rugged American quality to the most eloquent of the King's buddies. Stacy Pendergraft as saucy Jaquenetta, Jon Van Middlesworth as Moth, and Ann Morrison as Rosaline stand out in a largely excellent cast. But what's the use if the governing concept is so far from affecting us?
There were some moments when I felt I was watching Shakespeare — particularly when the superb Brian Shea was on stage as the clown Costard — but too often the production's concept got in the way of any such feeling, and the Bard's words came across as if in a foreign language. This is not the production to make a Shakespeare fan out of a skeptic.
Which brings me to another problem: the quality of the singing. Mitchell sets the play in the 1930s, and composer Bob McDowell's catchy music (much different from his bland work in last year's Twelfth Night Fever) often has a nice Cole Porter or George Gershwin feel. (Lino Toyos' pastel palace set also contributes to the '30s ambience.) But for the most part, the actors in this production — including the best of them — simply don't have the quality voices we have a right to expect in a professional musical theater production.
So you're sitting under the stars, feeling bored and uncomfortable with the fact that you don't find this comedy all that funny, and then a song begins and it's not skillfully handled. This actress has a fine midrange but has trouble with the high notes; that actor doesn't really seem to be a singer at all. Is it too much to ask that a musical be cast with musically accomplished professionals? Can it really be that hard to find actors who are also strong singers?
I don't want to read too much into this production. Two years ago, Ken Mitchell proved to be a fine director of Shakespeare when he staged an admirable Winter's Tale. Maybe he's simply better at the Bard's serious work; maybe we'll have many opportunities in coming years to learn that this year's and last year's productions were the exceptions. In any case, Shakespeare in the Park remains a wonderful tradition, and the promise of a lovely evening at Demens Landing, hearing the Bard's wonderful language, remains untarnished by a particular failure.
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 3, 2001.