Word: lachow
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...that often. The few companies that tackle it usually resort either to theater-as-carnival-spectacle (bolstering the endless wordplay with sight gags, the traditional devices with slapstick), to avant-grade-extremism, or to massive cutting. The summer loebies have tried a little of all three, but director Gregg Lachow applies the experimentation with a temperate hand. His greatest accomplishment is leaving the staging simple enough so that the occasional striking line has room to breathe, and the play's fascinating structure emerges from its weight of words. In so doing, he resists the natural impulse of most directors...
Even more interesting, Lachow's approach makes the staging reflect a recurrent theme in the play, the repeated and unsuccessful attempts of the characters to abandon artifice and bombast; they man age occasionally for a line or two but never for long...
...Lachow's opening device is typical Instead of trying to coddle the audience through a long expository opening scene with clowns and cavortings, he leaves the Ex dark for at least ten minutes, forcing the audience to concentrate as four disembodied voices exhaustively lay out the play's premise. The King of Navarre (Alex Pearson) has persuaded his three friends. Dumanine, Longaville, and Berowne, to join in a vow to study for three years-fasting, rarely sleeping, and forswearing the company of women. They all swear, despite misgivings, quite forgetting that the Princess of France is arriving that...
...Lachow expends a great deal of extremely creative effort trying to give these characters individual identities. Some of this devices are brilliant--a series of "candid" snapshots of the four ladies, for example, accompany the lords standard ravings before the female delegation first appears. Likewise, a long home-movie of one clownish master-and-page pair (Brian McCue and Jessica Marshall) offers a solid basis for the two's relationship before their first exchange, and the relationship provides one of the few emotional landmarks in a wilderness of obscure Renaissance jokes. In other cases Lachow resorts to more familiar conceits...
...rest of the cast uniformly sustains this high energy level Gregg Lachow, as Johan Toennesen, Lona's half-brother, and Paul Warner as Bernick's model son Olaf, balance admirably between humor and a straight interpretation. Lachow conveys the wounded dignity of Bernick's betrayed friend without slipping into melodrama...