Shakespeare takes a spa day

Is White Lotus showrunner Mike White a modern-day bard? The Folger Shakespeare Library has at least entertained the question.

After the first season of the Emmy-winning dark comedy aired in 2022, the Washington, D.C.-based institution published a guest post by Austin Tichenor which favourably compared the tropical HBO program — each season set in a different luxury resort — to The Tempest.

“There’s something wonderfully contained about The White Lotus. Unlike other epic and sprawling miniseries, this six-episode character study feels surprisingly intimate, like the five acts of a Shakespeare play,” wrote Tichenor, the co-artistic director of California’s Reduced Shakespeare Company.

“And while there’s no actual storm, the sounds of wind, waves, and surf punctuate the proceedings, adding tension and underscoring the turbulence characters are going through.”

In Manitoba, Michelle Boulet couldn’t help but consider one of her favourite Shakespearean comedies as she watched the show’s company of actors — Jennifer Coolidge, Walton Goggins and Parker Posey among them — skewer the uber-rich and ultra-privileged.

So when Boulet was brought in to direct the season-opening production of As You Like It for Shakespeare in the Ruins, she knew she wanted to set Orlando and Rosalind adrift in an exclusive, wooded spa.

“The show was a launching pad, because, of course, all the characters in White Lotus are extremely unlikable, and (As You Like It) is the opposite,” says Boulet.

“It’s fast-paced, it’s funny, it’s not really cynical, yet it has a huge heart; I think that’s what really made me fall in love with it for the first time,” adds the director, who counts Rosalind as one of her favourite roles played as an actor.

When reimagining the production — which hasn’t been staged by SiR since 2004 — Boulet says she wanted to “hang the story off of a modern world.”

“I didn’t want to go old-timey with costumes,” she says. “So I thought — resort.”

Opening tonight at the Trappist Monastery Ruins in St. Norbert, this interpretation of As You Like It imagines the banished characters commingling at a spa-like retreat: instead of being sequestered in a jail cell, characters in this dukedom are relocated to La Forêt D’Ardenne, basking poolside in their own reflections.

“I put one scene on the other side, facing the (St. Norbert) golf course, so it’s definitely using these golfers as background performers,” adds Boulet. “It’s just fascinating to have them behind, and they don’t even know they’re in the shot. The architecture lends itself to the spa-like setting, and the music that has been woven through the show carries you effortlessly along.”

As in The White Lotus, the first three seasons of which were enlivened by the compositions of Cristobal Tapia de Veer, Boulet understood that musical elements couldn’t be ignored in what she calls Shakespeare’s “most Mozartian” play.

Sarah Constible, the play’s music director, composer and assistant director, has heard As You Like It referred to as “an embryonic” musical, which is evidenced by the various interpretations seen by Canadian audiences in recent years.

A longtime SiR collaborator, Constible performed as Jaques in the 2020 co-production of the play between Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre; that version memorably mashed up Shakespeare with Lennon and McCartney.

“Michelle and I have composed for all the songs in the show, plus we’ve added a couple of originals,” Constible says. “It’s that kind of show where it’s light and silly, about love and happiness, and you know, being outside, I think the music really adds a lovely, joyful quality to it, which is, I think, a very necessary thing right now.”

While Boulet didn’t instruct the cast — featuring Mallory James, Liam Dutiaume, Honey Pham, Rayna Masterton, Justin Fry, Tom Keenan, Kevin Klassen, Melanie Whyte and Artie Lorraine — to use the White Lotus framing to shape their characterizations, the director does note a few other connection points between the two comedies.

The series’ second season, set in Sicily, features a very cynical piano player, which gave Boulet an interesting inclination as to Whyte’s character of Jaques, who delivers the famed line about the world being a stage in the play’s second act.

Unlike the tortured Giuseppe, portrayed in The White Lotus by Federico Scribani, Jaques is “melancholic, but loves music,” says Boulet, which led the creative team to situate the character in a jazzy piano bar.

“We’ve put a twist on Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man (scene) that I don’t think people have seen before,” says Boulet, whose cast and crew prepared for the viewing public by hosting school shows at the ruins in May.

“And Melanie Whyte just makes that speech sing. I’ve never seen high school kids listen like that to a speech. It’s tricky for kids to think about the seven stages of man when they’re only themselves just in age two.”

One way this SiR production is unlike the titular HBO spa is that guests won’t be asked to turn in their cellular devices upon entry to the ruins.

“I could have asked the audience to hand their cellphones in, but that would have been a big, logistical nightmare,” Boulet says with a laugh.

Silence your ringers, or else.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman

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