Huzzah! Shakespeare in the Park has returned to Central Park’s newly refurbished Delacorte Theater — the perfect venue to celebrate one of the city’s most remarkable and entirely free amenities. On approaching the outdoor amphitheater, the first thing you detect is the tilted curve of the outer shell, clad in handsome redwood (from 25 decommissioned water tanks) that emits the woodsy aroma of a sauna. There’s an inviting overhang at the entrance, allowing for more theatergoers to seek shelter in case of an inevitable summer rain shower. (There are welcome upgrades to the public restrooms, as well, including many more stalls for women that might shorten intermission times.) Once inside, the seating looks much the same, though there are more spaces for disabled patrons, slightly wider seats, and an added back row to keep the capacity to roughly 1,800. (A good deal of the $85 million renovation was devoted to the stage, dressing rooms, and other areas mostly unseen by audiences.)
The inaugural production is a revival of the Bard’s gender-bending comedy Twelfth Night that is as brisk and breezy as a summer wind. Director Saheem Ali brings some deft modern touches to the streamlined script, and makes good use of the stage’s new modular trap doors to lift both actors and elements of Maruti Evans’ set onto the stage, which is backed by giant letters spelling out the play’s subtitle: “What You Will.”
Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o stars as as a luminously spunky Viola, a well-bred woman who washes up in Illyria after a shipwreck that has separated her from her twin brother, Sebastian (played by real-life brother Junior Nyong’o, who despite a height discrepancy looks so much like his sister that the play’s mistaken-identity shenanigans actually work). Viola is persuaded to dress as a man to join the squad of bro-ish servants of the bachelor duke Orsino, played by Khris Davis as the ultimate underemployed rich kid who spends most of his time getting buff in the gym or vainly pursuing the countess Olivia (Sandra Oh). Viola, now donning a pinstripe suit as a page named Cesario, is dispatched to ply Orsino’s suit to Olivia — who naturally finds herself falling for this smooth-talking intermediary instead.
Meanwhile, there’s a good deal of low-brow humor to be mined from Olivia’s debaucherous uncle Toby Belch (John Ellison Conlee), his clownish buddy Andrew Aguecheek (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and Olivia’s servant Maria (Daphne Rubin-Vega) — who team up to pull an elaborate prank on the priggish and dictatorial steward Malvolio who been running Olivia’s household with a tight fist. Peter Dinklage, who made a striking and grounded impression as Richard III at the Public two decades ago, is an inspired choice to play the much maligned Malvolio, who’s tricked into believing that Olivia has fallen for him and dons a ridiculous outfit that he falsely believes will win her over. (Oana Botez designed the cheery costumes, a mish-mash of old-fashioned 20th-century styles with wide trousers, frilly tops, and floor-length skirts — but with contemporary flourishes, like Toby’s Adidas track suit or Orsino’s sleeveless gym wear.)
Dinklage is a hoot, whether he’s walking stiffly about the stage with his hands rigidly by his sides or shaking his butt to the beat of the show’s various tunes (performed both by a string quartet and Moses Sumney’s electric guitar-wielding Feste). His face flashes a full range of put-upon expressions, and his voice delivers symphonies of exasperation and misguided ardor. He manages to upstage several of the show’s other comic foils, which makes his eventual comeuppance all the more bittersweet. (There’s also something a bit unsettling in an actor of Dinklage’s size becoming the target of others’ ridicule — which adds a different dimension to his vows of revenge at the very end.)
Ali updates the material in surprising ways, leaning into the Kenyan heritage he shares with his two leads: Lupita Nyong’o speaks Swahili in her first scene as she washes ashore, and again when she reunites with Sebastian, a nod to their status as migrants and outsiders that is present but never overemphasized. Ali also introduces some wonderfully contemporary visual jokes throughout. The reprobate Toby and Andrew are seen carousing with a bong and cocaine in a hot tub, while Davis’ Orsino works out in a gym with a Kehinde Wiley-style portrait of himself on the wall — and orders members of his entourage to drop and give him 10 pushups as punishment for speaking out of turn. When Andrew threatens to leave Olivia’s palace, a stacked luggage cart appears with a stuffed raccoon on top — a reference to the wildlife intruders at the Delacorte whose visits have become so frequent that the Public now sells plush merch of the critters. (Several raccoons prowled atop the outer walls before the performance I attended, but none made it to the stage mid-show.)
The updates work — in part because the dialogue remains (mostly) intact and because there’s an authenticity to the attempts to wring laughs out of 400-year-old material. Nyong’o’s Cesario now beat-boxes her master’s love song and characters wield hair dryers to clean up after that coke-fueled party. But some of the funniest bits are also the simplest, as when Toby cries “Eh!” while exiting toward the giant letter A on stage. In another inspired moment, Toby and his prankish pals hide behind three-foot-tall letters spelling T-R-E-E while Malvolio pores over the forged love letter supposedly from his mistress. Ali knows how to hold back. It would have been tempting to put a modern gloss everywhere but when Malvolio is encouraged to dress foolishly, he still dons cross-gartered yellow stockings — not some ’70s-style leisure suit with bell-bottom pants.
In addition to Dinklage, the standouts in the cast include Ferguson, Conlee, and Oh, who brings a game earnestness to her role as the ultimate straight woman in a show full of clowns and dissemblers. But for a play renowned for its queerness, both actual and just beneath the surface, there’s a notable straightness to the production overall. There’s virtually no homoerotic tension between Nyong’o’s character and Oh’s Viola — or, for that matter, Davis’ Orsino, who seems to consider his young page as a romantic possibility only after she reveals herself to be a woman. Despite the casting of the nonbinary actor b as Antonio, an exiled sea captain with a barely sublimated affection for Sebastian, that duo too never quite register as avatars of queer desire.
Not that Twelfth Night needs to wave a rainbow flag to succeed. But this production departs from other recent revivals in taking a humbler, less transgressive approach to the various romantic entanglements. Even in the curtain call, when the cast reassembles in colorful new outfits as part of a drag-ball sendoff, the show seems to be conjuring a party atmosphere for which there’s no overarching agenda. The message is simple: Come as you are, love what you will. And to rechristen a venue that’s both fresh and familiar, a welcome beacon of summer fun, perhaps that’s enough. ★★★★☆
TWELFTH NIGHT
Delacorte Theatre, Central Park
Running time: 2 hours (no intermission)
Tickets available for free through five different locations/means through September 14
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