Word: twelfths
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Quite by chance it happens that we now have two simultaneous productions of Twelfth Night. The work was chosen by Gerald Freedman, the newly appointed artistic director of the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, as the vehicle for resuming activity after a season's hiatus. And it is the inaugural offering of the second "Broadway at Brandeis" season here at the Spingold Theatre in nearby Waltham. With such a wondrous work, however, this overlapping by no means constitutes excess--or "surfeit," to use the play's own word for one of its major themes...
...Twelfth Night offers unusual latitude to a director; indeed the dramatist himself provided it with the subtitle What You Will. But whoever painted the wooden sign outside the AST grounds went too far in calling the play The Twelfth Night; perhaps he came to work from watching The Seventh Dawn on the Late Late Show...
...flutist, cellist and lutanist take their place in a far corner of the hall. They provide the accompaniment for two unspecified songs, followed by a dance (choreographed by Graciela Daniele) in which the white-masked members of the court all participate. We seem to be watching a traditional Twelfth Night masque. And all this preliminary music gives added point to the play's opening lines, in which Duke Orsino refers to the "excess" of music, to a "dying fall" (which is accurately fitted to a descending cadence), and finally requests a halt...
...Although Twelfth Night is one of the shorter plays in the canon, Freedman felt it necessary to compensate for all the time given to musical numbers, here and later, by cutting quite a bit of the text; in order to get the running-time down to two hours and forty minutes. I wish he'd had the courage to give us the full text and let the show run three hours...
Presiding over the play is the clown Feste, whose name doubtless came from the mock-king fest us who ruled over the old Twelfth Night saturnalia. Feste was assigned the four major songs, since Shakespeare's acting company had recently acquired in Robert Armin a gifted singer to succeed the clown Will Kempe. The current Feste is Mark Lamos, who not only has a fine voice but also plucks his own theorbo in the charming songs composed by John Morris. Freedman has also given Feste four additional singers. In the setting of "O Mistress Mine," for instance, with its lovely...