TT: Love among the redwoods

In the last of three reports from my recent drama-related travels in California, I review two shows currently being performed at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Lion in Winter. Both are superior. Here’s an excerpt.
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While some of Shakespeare’s plays border on being performer-proof, others need tender loving care to flourish onstage. “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is one of the latter, a relentlessly artificial farce whose comedy is almost entirely verbal and whose hectically bawdy wordplay leaves little room for the richness of characterization that modern audiences expect from a Shakespeare production. Small wonder that “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is mounted so infrequently in America that I’ve reviewed it in this space only once before now. The good news–very, very good news–is that Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s outdoor production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” directed by Scott Wentworth, is a complete success…
Rarely do I get to see a production of a Shakespeare comedy in which each member of a large cast stands out in such high relief. Fold in a heaping helping of zany comic business and you get a show that is not just amusing but wildly, chokingly funny. Then, without warning, the last scene modulates into the shadowy key of doubt, and after the play’s enigmatic closing line (“You that way: we this way”) is spoken, you leave the theater marveling anew at Shakespeare’s matchless ability to surprise….
Indoors on the company’s adjoining main stage, Richard E.T. White has directed a vigorous revival of James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” a play that is now best known in its handsomely cast 1968 film version, which teamed Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn, but is even more rewarding when seen in live performance….
Goldman’s play, in which the strife-ridden marriage of England’s Henry II (Marco Barricelli) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Kandis Chappell) is portrayed as a drawing-room comedy steeped in wormwood and gall, is a piece of theatrical prestidigitation that juxtaposes a 12th-century setting with 20th-century dialogue (“Is this an audience, a goodnight kiss with cookies or an ambush?”). The trick is to deliver the clever lines not archly but with ram-you-damn-you boldness, and Mr. Barricelli, the company’s artistic director, has it down pat. He gives a leonine, space-filling performance that put me in mind of the young Orson Welles…
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Read the whole thing here.