Canadian Stage’s Shakespeare in High Park is at once an enormously impressive theatrical production and a completely unassuming one. Tucked away into a tree-screened corner of High Park, this year’s line-up includes As You Like It and Titus Andronicus. The same 12 actors perform both plays on alternating nights. Despite the enormous challenge of switching between plays and genres night after night, this year’s cast is more than up to the task.
The plays are performed in the open air at the High Park Amphitheatre. Many patrons bring food, blankets, and even lawn chairs to the performances. Surrounded by trees that fit in seamlessly with the large wooden stage, with patrons seated on stone steps set in a grassy slope, this is the most immersive Shakespeare experience you’re likely to come across in the city. As You Like It, a comedy of mistaken identity, is set largely in the Forest of Arden, and it’s not hard for the audience to imagine that they’re actually in the forest themselves. Safe from the blundering mistakes of the characters onstage, they’re still right next to the action.
The actors take this immersive experience one step further with musical interludes, where the audience is encouraged to clap along, and maybe even attempt some minor seat-dancing if they’re not feeling too groggy from their picnics. A 90-minute performance, including multiple costume changes and lots of movement, is tough going without any real intermission, but the players make do with lively songs (written by Sam Sholdice) that manage to entertain the audience, as well as give the actors a chance to change and rest.
As night descends in High Park, the strangeness and hilarity increases onstage. As You Like It follows Rosalind and Orlando, two young people in France whose family situations are more hostile than most —though they’re pretty run-of-the-mill, as far as Shakespeare families go. Banished separately to the Forest of Arden, Orlando and Rosalind meet after an initial romantic encounter, pre-exile. This time, however, Rosalind is masquerading as a young man called Ganymede.
Disguised, Rosalind begins a strange courtship with Orlando, promising that she can cure him of his infatuation with Rosalind by pretending to be her. Rosalind’s problems escalate when Phebe, a young shepherdess, falls in love with her male alter ego, Ganymede, and Rosalind herself becomes increasingly desperate to marry Orlando.
Led by the charming Amy Rutherford, who plays Rosalind, the entire cast manages something rarely accomplished: to perform a Shakespearean play that is both easy to follow and genuinely funny. The script is slightly modernized for ease of comprehension, and the costumes are inspired by 1950s France, but it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s original play — faithful, yet still enjoyable, even if you’re not a huge fan of the Bard.
Shakespeare in High Park continues until August 31 at the High Park Amphitheatre.
