At times, the Lincoln Center Festival is the high-art answer to Ep cot’s World Showcase — building entire ven ues from scratch so we can see foreign companies in their home environment without leaving New York.
A tent evoking a 300-year-old Kabuki theater once went up in Damrosch Park; two years ago, a replica of Paris’ Theatre du Soleil was erected inside the Park Avenue Armory.
This year, LCF teamed with the Armory again to host the Royal Shakespeare Company: 41 actors and 21 musicians, plus a life-size duplicate of the troupe’s theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, assembled in the Armory’s cavernous Drill Hall.
If the wonderful, wildly entertaining “As You Like It” — the first of the five plays the RSC will present in repertory through mid-August — is any indication, the effort is well worth the cost.
The three-tiered, U-shaped, thrust-stage structure puts each of the 975 audience members tantalizingly close to the action. Should you land in one of the first three or four rows, you’d best brush up your Shakespeare, because you might as well be in the play.
But while the setting adds an extra level on the thrill-o-meter, this production of “As You Like It” would be enjoyable just about anywhere.
Michael Boyd, the RSC’s artistic director, has staged the comedy in a perceptive way that honors all its facets, from humor to romance, from ditzy clowning to somber politics. Just like Tom Piper’s deceptively spare set, it reveals its riches, little by little.
The basic plot centers on Rosalind (Katy Stephens) and her BFF cousin Celia (Mariah Gale), on the run from Celia’s Duke of a father (James Tucker). Rosalind dresses as a man to elude their pursuers, and ends up counseling the object of her affections, Orlando (Jonjo O’Neill), in matters of the heart. Typically, he doesn’t recognize the woman he loves now that she’s sporting a drawn-on mustache and soul patch — in her duster coat, Stephens looks like a cute musketeer stranded in a Western.
Stephens is an older, more mature Rosalind than the girlish, impetuous one we usually get. But her restrained take gradually takes hold, and her nuanced performance hits the right balance between slapstick and passion. Her sensational voice — a low, smoky melange of velvet and ashes — doesn’t hurt, either.
The rest of the cast is similarly nimble, with special kudos to Richard Katz’s Touchstone, with his size-20 shoes and a sad-clown expression, and to Forbes Masson’s Jaques, who exhibits the calculated melancholy of a born pop star — and sings like one, in a gorgeous falsetto.
Best of all: We will soon see these actors perform completely different parts in the other plays — Gale, for instance, is the female lead in “Romeo and Juliet.”
What a treat!