twelfth night

TWELFTH NIGHT
New Swan Shakespeare Festival, July/August 2014
TWELFTH NIGHT – DIRECTOR NOTES This is, quite frankly, my favorite play in the Shakespearean canon. The Bard's most lyrical work, it is an uncanny blend of heartfelt romance, comic fun, boisterous adventure, and poignant discoveries. Our Hollywood setting was born when I contemplated the characters that populate the transcendent world of Illyria, a place that is filled with possibilities, wonderment, and magic -­‐-­‐ like Hollywood in the 1920s. It became clear to me that everyone was playacting in a fantastical way. I began to see Orsino as a powerful studio mogul modeled on Orson Welles. Olivia, as a Greta Garboesque screen star mourning for her lost brother in her estate in the hills. Sir Andrew and Sir Toby as Laurel and Hardy. Feste as an Eddie Cantor/Buster Keaton vaudevillian, moving to the big screen. Into this world our shipwrecked heroine, Viola, is delivered. Assuming a masculine role that is partly a memorial to her lost twin brother, she finds herself in a tangled web of unrequited love. Shakespeare might have been content to leave us with a clever disguise plot and madcap hilarities; instead, he leads us on a journey that contemplates identities lost and found, the true nature of love, the importance of celebration, and the power of fate. What does it mean to lose your "self" in love? How do you find your way out of a maze of complicated desires? Should pomposity and miserliness be punished? When does getting even with a bad guy cross the line and become just plain cruel? In Twelfth Night we have plays within plays within plays: dizzying fun that crosses at points into something dangerously close to madness. Sebastian, trying to make sense of Olivia's unprompted passion for him, muses, "What relish is in this? How runs the stream? Or I am mad or else this is a dream." Viola proclaims to Olivia, "I am not that I play." The prompt of a false letter is enough to make Malvolio act out his dream of marrying Olivia and get lost in the performance. Feste brilliantly flips between playing Sir Topas and playing himself. And Fabian sums it all up, "If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction." "What country, friends, is this?" What kind of world is filled with hope, narcissism, and the promise of self-­‐realization? A place where the dream of finding true love and fulfilling your destiny exists in every breath you take. "If music be the food of love, play on!" Welcome to Orsino Studios. We hope you enjoy the show.
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ARTS A Tale of Two Shakespeares A worthy pair of plays spans Orange County's vast production chasm By Joel Beers Thursday, Aug 7 2014 A tale of two Shakespeare companies: one benefitting from an intimate relationship with respected UC Irvine theater department and has created on of the most striking performance venues you will ever see; the other a gypsy troupe that stages its plays outdoors. But while the New Swan Shakespeare Festival and the Alchemy Theatre may differ in terms of financial support and physical place, the fact that each pulls off an enjoyable production proves that as long as you have a committed cast and space for people to stand, sit or lie down, theater can be produced anywhere. You just have to work a lot harder outside to make it work. !
This is the third year the New Swan has held court in Irvine. Though a professional company, it is closley affilitated with UCI, thanks to artistic director Eli Simon being a theater professor there. Its New Swan Theater is a 15-­‐toon, portable, open-­‐roofed mini-­‐Elizabethan theater, basically a three-­‐level cylinder made of steel and wood that can seat iup to 130. With five separate seating areas, from on the floor to the balcony, each perch lends a different perspective, and the actors are never more than a few feet away. !
Of course, if your cast and production are shite, it doesn't matter how innovative the physical setting is. Fortunately for Simon, who directs this production of Twelfth Night, his cast is more than capable.
Set on a 1920s Hollywood sound stage, Orsino Studios, which lends a Keystone Cops-­‐like vibe to the proceedings, Simon's staging makes the show look and feel more accessible and intimate, but the life and vigor are supplied by his superb cast. Rare indeed is the Shakespeare production that doesn't have a weak link somewhere. This ensemble of undergrads, graduate students and outside actors is one of them. No one misses a beat, from Colin Nesmith’s gloriously over-­‐the-­‐top Malvolio to Joshua Blair’s Buster Keatonish fool Feste to Rosemary Brownlow as the surrering-­‐in-­‐silence Viola. !
It’s intimate, hilarious, and a top-­‐notch production all around. !
The New Swan already has a space that should be the envy of most companies in this county.
New Swan Shakespeare Festival's Twelfth Night !
By Andrew Tonkovich July 10, 2014 !
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You’ll understand the “no late seating” warning if you first take in the amazing New Swan Shakespeare Festival’s sustainable, portable outdoor mini-­‐Elizabethan theatre in daylight hours, a reproduction built adjacent the Langson Library which is gorgeous even without the actors and audience. Constructed seasonally on the UC Irvine campus, this ultimate, intimate multi-­‐tiered theater-­‐in-­‐the-­‐round summer venue complements nicely the troupers’ innovative, smart adaptation of Twelfth Night, the farcical romantic comedy favorite with something to please everybody—twins, shipwreck, jester—with this one set in the early days of Hollywood talkies. !
Some theater is born great, New Swan achieves greatness, and you should by all means have theirs thrust upon you. examiner.com
Jordan Young LA./OC Arts Examiner, July, 2014 !
After seeing a production of “ Twelfth Night” last year, I decided it wasn’t one of Shakespeare’s better plays. New Swan Shakespeare Festival’s current production (running through Aug. 30 at UC Irvine) has convinced me there’s more to it than I thought. It’s also a much funnier play than I realized, at least in the hands of director Eli Simon, who’s cleverly reimagined the Bard’s world of Illyria as Hollywood of the 1920s and sent in the clowns to take charge of the zany goings-­‐on. !
Studio mogul Duke Orsino (David Nevell) is ostensibly in command, and his tangled love triangle with movie queen Olivia (Samantha Aneson) and shipwreck survivor Viola (Rosemary Brownlow), who’s disguised as a boy, forms the central plot. But vaudevillian Feste (Joshua Blair), Olivia’s uncle Sir Toby Belch (Sean Spann) and his dim-­‐witted pal Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Greg Ungar) are the lunatics running the asylum and making a mockery of the proceedings—all to the tune of a ragtime piano. !
Blair, who renders his songs in a style suggesting “ The Threepenny Opera,” is outstanding in his seriocomic performance as the wise fool. Spann is hilarious as his chief cohort, while Ungar and Hayley Palmer (Olivia’s maid, Maria) are highly amusing as their accomplices. Aneson could rely on her glamorous movie star looks but instead offers an incisive portrait of the feminine psyche; Brownlow’s thoughtful characterization does much to clarify the complications of the plot. Kathryn Wilson’s costumes are impressive. !
Call 949-­‐824-­‐2787 or visit www.NewSwanShakespeare.com.
Eli Simon knows a thing or two about giving William Shakespeare’s plays a breath of fresh air. Simon serves as the artistic director for the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, a seven-­‐week-­‐long event to be hosted at UC Irvine from Thursday through Aug. 30. The third annual festival features performances of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Twelfth Night” in an authentic 125-­‐seat theater-­‐in-­‐the-­‐round. The theater – which weighs 30,000 pounds and sits in the center of campus – sits in storage for most of the year. It has two seating tiers and is modeled in Elizabethan-­‐style. Simon, a UC Irvine professor who has been involved in the festival since its inception, worked to make a Roaring ’20s adaptation of “ Twelfth Night” for this year’s festival. He said the characters in the play are based on iconic figures of the decade, including Greta Garbo and comedy-­‐duo Laurel and Hardy. Simon said it was a challenge balancing the comedic and romantic aspects in “Twelfth Night.” “I’m always hoping that we’ll strive to find a perfect balance and it’s hard to find with this play,” Simon said. “We think that it will be extraordinarily entertaining but hopefully moving as well for both the actors and the audience.” Simon said being in a theater-­‐in-­‐the-­‐round is “nirvana” for both the actors and audience members. He said the theater is optimal for the audience, since no one sits further than 10 feet from where the actors perform. Unlike its adapted counterpart “ Twelfth Night,” “Romeo and Juliet” is set in Elizabethan-­‐era Italy. Simon, who has traveled across the globe for various stage productions, said he noticed Shakespeare’s ability to connect with world audiences. He thinks theater has the ability to unite everyone. “I’ve found that there really are universal truths that bind us as people and performers,” Simon said. “Part of that is the love of coming together and uniting in the spirit of theater to participate in the ritual of telling stories and reveling in them.” In conjunction with the play performances, UC Irvine will host a seminar series on topics ranging from masculinity in “Romeo and Juliet” to love and “lovesickness” in “ Twelfth Night.”