In love's service, a world of deception and manipulation: Southbank's 'Twelfth Night'

Musical theater steeped in rock and soul genres seems a natural way to adapt 'Twelfth Night." Southbank Theatre Company's new production enters lustily into this version of Shakespeare's manic Illyria, the setting of a comedy of mistaken identities, both deliberate and accidental. 

With music and lyrics by Shaina Taub, based on the conception she forged with Kwame Kwei-Armah, the show is a surprisingly successful adaptation of a mature Shakespeare comedy far from the two-dimensional framework of the early "Two Gentlemen of Verona," which received successful musical treatment a half-century ago.

In a preview performance Wednesday night on the Playground at Indy Fringe, the cast directed by Max McCreary had the momentum right for the frantic action, with the ancient mask of comedy firmly in place. The catchy songs help the story float along and conveniently keep the play from going too deep into the verbal weeds. 

Failing suitor Sir Andrew confronts skeptical clown Feste.

The deeply informed literary critic Harold Bloom, who tended to be disappointed by staged Shakespeare that seemed to him to get something wrong, remarks in his essay on "Twelfth Night" that "the fault of every staging...I've attended is that the pace is not fast enough. It ought to be played at the frenetic tempo that befits this company of zanies and antics." 

Opening tonight and running through May 8, the Southbank production has it right — buoyed by Taub's songs and their usually crisp and lively delivery at the preview.  Much of the show's comic energy was concentrated brightly in the roles of Sir Toby Belch (Mark Cashwell), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Kim Egan), and the wooing-resistant Olivia (Natalie Fisher).

Only in some of the subtler musical links —and perhaps sometimes imprecise due to a face-microphone cutout — did the coordination and vigor falter between voices and instruments. The seven-piece band, placed to one side next to the IndyFringe van, upheld its crucial end of the musical bargain under the direction of keyboardist Ginger Stoltz. The ensemble songs clicked, prepared by choral director Brad Thompson and underlined by Dani Gibb's choeography.                                               

Noblewoman Olivia is resolved to turn down suitors.

The self-absorbed, lovesick Duke Orsino's famous opening line, "If music be the food of love, play on" appropriately gets collective celebration in song, as if Taub considered that to be the Bard's invitation to lend her creativity to his play. Why not? After all, its subtitle, "What You Will," constitutes an authorized "whatever," an emoticon shrug, endorsing just what both players and audience may choose to make of it. 

Later, after the rare tenderness of the disguised Viola's conversation with Orsino (nicely played by Michelle Wafford Mannweiler and Dave Pelsue), her rhetorical question "Is this not love?" is picked up in a soulful solo by Feste (Paige Scott) that eventually turns into an anthemic ensemble. The song's assertion of what real love is, topping all the shenanigans and the misplaced affections, sets up the finale, in which even the "horribly abused" puritan Malvolio (fiercely embodied by Hannah Boswell), who has departed the stage in fury, is welcomed back into the Illyrian fold.

The song promises happiness to anyone who can see themselves in others and is able to

Mutually lost siblings Sebastian and Viola find each other.

welcome differences. It recognizes that we are all subject to deception, some of which we bring upon ourselves. It's a nearly utopian vision of the reality that might be seen as an emendation of Malvolio's apothegm "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them" if we tolerantly substitute "foolish" for "great(ness)."  

That theme of universal acceptance was given memorable permanence in an older rousing finale, the chorus that ends Verdi's "Falstaff" and points out "Tutti gabbati!" (all are fools). In more forgiving guise, the theme extends the sort of universal embrace that, by the laws of comedy, even severe killjoys like Malvolio can open their arms to.

It's not our reality today, of course, and it calls to mind what date the Christian observance of Twelfth Night ("the twelfth day of Christmas") falls upon: January 6. Hmmm — January 6. Rings a bell, doesn't it? All are fools, indeed.

[Photos by Rob Slaven]