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All you want is love.
In his pastoral comedy As You Like It, Shakespeare insisted that love, whether or not romantic love, or love of household, nation, nature, and even philosophies, offers that means and achievement to an individual’s life. Themes of affection pervade the 229 songs The Beatles wrote in the course of the decade the foursome spent collectively, and love was the mantra of the Flower Energy era of the Nineteen Sixties.
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The mashup of Shakespeare, Beatles and the mind-expanding escapism of the hippie era appears such a pure in Theatre Calgary’s As You Like It, however that’s solely due to the artistic genius of Daryl Cloran, who conceived, tailored and directed this joyous celebration of affection in its quite a few incarnations.
From the outset of this high-spirited musical romp, it’s apparent that quite a lot of love, and a good better deal of expertise, has gone into creating Cloran’s As You Like It. Musical director Ben Elliott cleverly tweaks the Beatles songs so they’re immediately recognizable, but additionally serve the plot twists and characterizations in Shakespeare’s play. Elliott, and thus the viewers, is served by a proficient onstage band whose 5 members double as characters within the play.
Jonathan Hawley Purvis’s choreography is easy however efficient, wanting extra pure than staged, as do Pam Johnson’s units, Carmen Alatorre’s costumes, Gerald King’s lighting designs, and Alistair Wallace’s sound designs. In any respect ranges, nice care has been taken to make the manufacturing serve the idea.
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Cloran’s contact is in all places from the hilarious preshow wrestling antics to the best way he permits characters to talk on to the viewers to maintain the night as light-hearted and buoyant as potential. Name it a dose of artistic helium. His biggest accomplishment is how he has skillfully woven the Beatles’ songs into Shakespeare’s textual content about banished lovers and mistaken identification.

The play boasts a dynamite forged of triple-threat performers who sing, dance and act as if all disciplines are second nature, and a few are additionally required to play devices and even wrestle.
Chelsea Rose and Oscar Derkx are the smitten, games-playing younger lovers Rosalind and Orlando. She is the cat, and he’s her plaything, a lot to the viewers’s delight. Each are distinctive singers, whether or not of their solos or a duet like I Need to Maintain Your Hand.
We see lustful love by way of the coupling of Touchstone (Andrew Cownden) and the earthy shepherdess Audrey (Jenny McKillop), simply two of Shakespeare’s memorable clowns. Nadien Chu performs each the tyrant Dame Francis and her light sister Dame Senior, basically displaying us the shades of character that may exist in the identical individual.
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The shepherd Silvius is supposed to indicate the harmful nature of unrequited love, however Anton Lipovetsky makes him such a profitable and keen lapdog that Silvius is rarely pitiful or pitiable, and rightfully so as a result of he has one of the lovely speeches within the play. Lipovetsky’s renditions of I Noticed Her Standing There, and Love Me Do are highlights in a present stacked with memorable moments.
Additionally a stand out on this stellar forged is Jan Alexandra Smith, because the misanthropic Jacques who’s the one one not moved, or modified, by all of the frivolity within the forest. Smith brings the character’s melancholy to I Am A Walrus and The Idiot on the Hill, and delivers, with aplomb and poignancy, Shakespeare’s well-known speech in regards to the seven ages of man.
If certainly, all you want is love, you’re going to get quite a lot of it within the three hours you’ll spend within the Max Bell Theatre, which, till March 24, has been reworked into the Okanagan of the Nineteen Sixties.
Theatre’ Calgary’s As You Like It performs in Max Bell Theatre till March 24.
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