Wonderful time at the spa

One likes to imagine the title of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It signalled some capitulation on the part of the Bard, to keep the pastoral comedy extra light.

(Was The Tempest too murder-y? The smear campaign against Hero in Much Ado About Nothing too upsetting? The humiliation of Malvolio excessive in Twelfth Night? Sigh. As You Like It.)

Or the title may too be a cue to directors: you may feel free to mess around with the show to your heart’s content, as director Daryl Cloran did with his Beatles-infused musical adaptation, which played the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in early 2020.

Director Michelle Boulet is likewise playful, but not as ambitiously so with this promenade production — about 2½ hours, including intermission — which opens the season at Shakespeare in the Ruins. Boulet wisely plays the hand she is dealt in the lovely but constrictive outdoor setting of the Trappist Monastery Ruins in St. Norbert, which sees the audience move from scene to scene with provided chairs in tow.

She contemporizes the story and sets most of it in a “spa” in the Forest of Ardennes, inspired by Mike White’s HBO series The White Lotus, which is set in a variety of luxury resorts.

(This is why, when the audience is required to promenade, you may come across choristers serenading you with songs involving “moist towelettes.” Kudos to music director/composer Sarah Constible.)

But be assured the tone stays consistently light: The White Lotus is definitely too murder-forward to emulate here.

That said, it does start with a murder plot hatched by Oliver (Justin Fry) against his younger brother Orlando (Liam Dutiaume), setting him up to be killed in a silly lucha libre wrestling match.

At the same time, the power-hungry Duke Frederick (Kevin Klassen) contrives to banish his niece Rosalind (Mallory James) against the wishes of his own daughter Celia (Honey Pham), who is Rosalind’s BFF, almost precisely at the same time as Rosalind and Orlando have fallen in thunderstruck love.

Hence, Rosalind, Celia and Orlando take off for the forest, where Frederick’s brother, the usurped Duke Senior (also Klassen), previously banished himself, has created his own laid-back pastoral court, complete with attendants in pale pink uniforms of shorts and blazers and much whizzing around on golf carts, which audience members bid “namaste” as they promenade.

For her own safety, Rosalind has disguised herself as a man, dubbed Ganymede, and when she encounters Orlando, she resolves to test his love by running the lad through a kind of training program to determine just how much he loves Rosalind.

Suffice to say: It all ends in a triple-wedding, also involving court fool Touchstone (Rayna Masterson), shepherd Aubrey (Tom Keenan), shepherd Oliver (Fry again) and shepherdess Phoebe (Artie Lorraine).

Adding a worldy touch is Jaques (Melanie Whyte), a piano bar philosopher who performs Shakespeare’s famous seven ages of man speech — “All the world’s a stage…” — as a kind of musical medley, a trick Whyte carries off with a kind of melancholic aplomb.

It all amounts to one of the most pleasurable SiR productions in a long time.

Rosalind is among Shakespeare’s most challenging female characters and it must be said James very much rises to that challenge, hilarious in the male guise of Ganymede (green track suit and hip-hop posturing), yet downright poignant in the play’s fourth-wall breaking epilogue, which allows the actress to read the Bard’s words but express her own feelings in the same breath.

With Shakespeare in the Ruins, experiences may vary depending on the weather. Thursday’s opening happened to be a near-perfect night, and if you’re lucky enough to catch a show on such an evening, you should be in for a lovely theatre experience.

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