Friday, July 11, 2003 | 8:43 a.m.
Patriotism and politics. Personal relationships and historical events. Royalty and real-life people. Loyalty and betrayal.
All of these contrasts sweep across the stage on splendid sets, the actors wearing striking costumes and speaking the English of William Shakespeare and modern playwrights at the 42nd annual Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City, Utah, a three-hour drive northeast of Las Vegas.
No matter which plays you see this season, Utah Shakespearean Festival audiences will enjoy the skills and crafts of 25 members of the Actors' Equity Association, four of them stage experts. Each play brings a level of professionalism that will not fail to delight and inspire theatergoers days after they leave the Southern Utah University campus.
Festival founder and Executive Producer Fred Adams said planners picked the six plays for this summer season three years ago, before the 9-11 attacks, before Afghanistan, before the war in Iraq.
Wrapped in tragedy and comedy, the plays bring a relevance to today's events and a focus on history repeating itself:
'Richard III'
For evil political mastery, no one has matched Shakespeare's King Richard III, duke of Gloucester, portrayed this season by actor Henry Woronicz.
Woronicz as the physically deformed and corrupt Richard III woos the audience as co-conspirators in his evil scheme to attain the throne of England, smiling and patting the throne set mid-stage each time he passes it throughout the play.
A nationally respected Shakespearean actor and director, Woronicz formerly directed the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is older than previous actors in the Richard III role. Yet he both attracts and repulses the audience, telling them, "And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stolen from holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil."
Although he appears older than his elder brothers, King Edward IV (Peter Sham) and George, duke of Clarence (Michael David Edwards), Richard succeeds by letting the audience in on his scheming until the stage is strewn with bodies and everyone on both sides of the stagelights villify him.
"I thank my God for my humility," Richard says, turning to smile at the audience, before King Edward learns of Clarence's death.
Anne Newhall as Queen Margaret, widow of King Henry VI, plays a passionate and convincing royal widow on a set based on the arches of Westminster Abbey during the time of the War of the Roses. Scenic designer Bill Forrester said he set the play in the soaring, vaulted shadows of cathedral arches, a more traditional presentation.
Lighting designed by Donna Ruzika casts a stained-glass effect over the ghosts of Richard's victims as they visit him in his dreams the night before the final battle scene.
"Richard III" Director J.R. Sullivan noted today's mass culture focuses public fascination on criminals, doting on their love problems (witness female fascination with Scott Peterson, accused of killing his wife, Laci, and their unborn son) as well as their sadism. "Elizabethan audiences doted on Richard," he said. "His diabolical ways, then and now, coincide with his unsettling but undeniable charm."
'Measure for Measure'
As diabolical as Richard seems, the versatile Woronicz also plays Vicentio, the duke in Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" with a focus that riveted the opening night audience seeing a production that has not graced the Utah festival stage since 1980.
Vicentio brings justice to the merciless Angelo (Scott Coopwood), who learns a valuable lesson in this mature Shakespeare tragi-comedy.
Elisabeth Adwin as Isabella, sister of Claudio, and Leslie Brott as Mistress Overdone shine with energy and wit in their roles.
Adwin's Isabella describes Angelo as "a proud man, dressed in a little brief authority" as she confronts him and begs for mercy for brother Claudio (Phillip Herrington), who has impregnated Juliet (Kelly Lamont).
Director Liz Huddle said that the play was produced soon after the death of Queen Elizabeth, who died without an heir. King James I of Scotland arrived on the English throne in 1603. Catholics in Great Britain at the time were lobbying for more recognition, while Puritans were trying to force restrictions on people, such as operators of bawdy houses and shutting down theaters, which were closed from 1642 until 1660.
"When the duke proposes marriage to Isabella at the end of the play, he is offering her the 'right' Protestant choice," Huddle said.
Huddle, no stranger to the Utah Shakespearean Festival, has directed "The Merry Wives of Windsor" at the 2000 season and "Twelfth Night" for last year's fall season.
While considered a comedy, "Measure for Measure" is tinged with tragedy as well, because the characters are bound by law, enforcing a strict moral code.
However, Shakespeare ends the play on a joyous note, after the characters and the audience learn that morals cannot be legislated. Instead, the characters have learned lessons on how to improve, be kinder to each other and, most important, be merciful.
'Much Ado About ...'
Director Kate Buckley said she was delighted when the Utah Shakespearean Festival asked if she would like to direct a play for the 2003 season.
"When asked if I would be interested in 'Much Ado About Nothing,' I was thrilled because it is my favorite Shakespearean comedy," Buckley said opening night.
'Ado' was written around 1598, but more than 400 years later audiences are still charmed and devastated, and explore love, revenge, reputation and pride.
While false accusations, rejections, insults and dark villainies challenge love during the story, Shakespeare was true to love, forgiveness, justice and reconciliation by the end of the play, Buckley said.
The lovers wage war throughout the play.
Then the impossible happens: Beatrice (Victoria Adams) and Benedick (Brian Vaughn), who swear they will never love, do so in the end.
Benedick is described as "a quick wit and a queasy stomach," while Beatrice describes herself as "born to speak all mirth and no manner. I was born under a star."
Prince Don Pedro (David Ivers) is accompanied by villainous half-brother Don John (Michael David Edwards) and younger gentlemen Benedick and Claudio (Eric J. Stern). Claudio is infatuated with Leonato's daughter, Hero (Kelly Lamont), and plans to marry her, while Benedick resumes his battle of wits with Leonato's niece, Beatrice.
Leonato, played by Joe Cronin, waves a paper with his script on it, still stumbling through his lines, much to the delight of the audience.
Mutual friends of Beatrice and Benedick work behind the scenes to turn the couple's spite into love. Don John, however, launches a diabolical subplot by convincing Claudio that Hero is unchaste, bringing public shame on her wedding day.
For modern audiences, Claudio's role is difficult to understand, since he believes the gossip about Hero.
This play was touching and hilarious, as Vaughn's Benedick had to hide in a man-made pond set at the front of the stage and ducked behind potted orange trees to hear plots unfold.
Scott Coopwood as Dogberry strutted about the stage, cracking his whip and providing comic relief. This is Coopwood's first appearance at the Utah Shakespearean Festival, but it shouldn't be his last.
'Born Yesterday'
Set in the 1940s, this play delighted theatergoers as the "dumb blonde" learned a valuable life lesson and left her cruel gangster boyfriend for a just and ethical newspaper reporter.
"This comedy, 'Born Yesterday,' is a real milestone for us," festival Executive Producer Fred Adams said. "We write the Declaration of Independence (in '1776') and we thought we'd like to see how easily it might be destroyed."
Director Kathleen Conlin brought out the best in Anne Newhall as Billie Dawn, the chorus girl who turns into a bookworm.
"It might send you home thinking a little bit more about the process," Adams said, referring to the access of powerful, rich lobbyists to the nation's congressmen.
"It gives us the secret pleasure of watching an uneducated showgirl show up a jaded New York lawyer (A. Bryan Humphrey as Ed Devery) and an East Coast thug (Craig Spidle as Harry Brock)," Conlin said. "It encourages us to remember that although 'anything goes,' an educated mind and a heart of gold can still rule the roost."
Enter Paul Verrall (Kurt Ziskie), Washington reporter for the New Republic, who is soon hired by Brock to teach Billie Dawn some manners. Verrall agrees to the arrangement to gain access to Brock.
"The only thing you can do is build me up or shut up," Brock tells the reporter.
"The idea of learning is to be bigger, not smaller," Verrall tells Dawn as he introduces her to books, reading newspapers and visiting art galleries.
Dawn discovers learning is hard work. "Why, I was so worried last night, it took me 10 minutes to get to sleep," she says at one point.
Meanwhile, Brock and Devery are using Dawn's signatures to hide their assets. "I can see a loophole at 20 paces," Devery says.
In the end, however, Dawn learns her lesson and leaves the cruel Brock.
"A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous," Verrall says after winning Dawn's hand.
'1776'
Patriotism reigned supreme with the production of "1776," but it was an old-fashioned, lump-in-the-throat kind in this production of Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards' play.
"I think it was an angel on our shoulder who said, the American people need a reminder of what it means to be an American," Fred Adams said.
"The reputation of those who shaped the fate of the nation have become historical forces in themselves," Director Brad Carroll said. "They have been twisted and turned to fit the needs of those who followed until, it seems, there is no actual person left, only a museum portrait or the occasional bronze statue in the town square.
"This wonderful play, '1776,' breathes new life into these portraits and statues, reinvigorating them and offering a new window into the lives and the humanity of those we have come to call our forefathers," Carroll said. "I like to think of '1776' as the history lesson we never got in school."
John Adams (Kurt Ziskie) was the country's first vice president and its second president, defeated for re-election because he was the most hated man of his time. Adams prodded, cajoled and plotted how to overcome the squabbling, over-heated Continental Congress to a decision to declare America independent of England, and in this play, Adams gets his due.
"I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress," Adams says, opening the play.
In the time from May 8 until July 4, 1776, the story of the founding of the United States unfolds in all its splendor and vigorous debate.
Victoria Adams, in her fourth festival season, exchanges letters as Abigail Adams with John, her husband in the play and in real life. She is a descendant of John and Abigail Adams.
At the time the U.S. was founded, Great Britain's empire had 10 million people and the 13 colonies had about 2 million, roughly the current population of Nevada today.
In contrast to Adams, Thomas Jefferson (Jason Heil) towers over the congress as the silent writer of the declaration. When Jefferson defeated Adams for president in 1800, Adams returned to his Quincy, Mass., farm until son John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States in 1824, the only instance, until recently, of a son following his father up the White House steps.
Peter Shaw as Benjamin Franklin was irascible as he sought to bring the wayward representatives, such as Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (Brian Vaugh), into the fold. Rutledge struck the freedom of slaves from the declaration before agreeing to sign it.
At one point, Franklin proclaims that Adams is a lawyer, Jefferson a farmer and himself a sage.
Phil Hubbard, as conservative Pennsylvania representative John Dickinson, led the opposition to uniting the diverse colonies. Hubbard heads the M.F.A. acting program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches acting and speech for stage.
Kevin Kiler as a courier sang a heart-breaking and poignant song about a mother finding her son dead in a meadow after a battle between American revolutionaries and British soldiers.
'Servant of Two Masters'
Fred Adams adapted this 18th century Italian comedy by Carlo Goldoni, and David Ivers plays the wickedly funny servant, Truffaldino, who hilariously tries to serves two masters, Federigo Rasponi (Sara Kathryn Bakker as a disguised Beatrice) and Florindo (Chris Hatch), in order to double his income.
Pantalone, played by A. Bryan Humphrey, repeats his madcap performance (audiences will remember him from "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and as Applegate in "Damn Yankees").
Sprinkled into this period piece are modern improvisations such as Avon ladies calling, cell phones ringing and Mormon missionaries, a tribute to the versatility of such a comedy.
"This is a farce, we don't even know if this fool thing is funny," Adams said to the audience. "Never has an audience been more needed."
"The Servant of Two Masters" started modern comic traditions, Director Russell Treyz said.
"Why commedia del arte?" Treyz said. "The answers, of course, are simple: Because it's funny. Because it's as alive and pertinent today as when it was written. Because the characters you'll find in the play still inhabit the sitcoms and movies of today."
Martha Stewart, homemaking maven in trouble over insider trading, and Monica Lewinsky, former intern to President Clinton, are references recognizable to modern audiences.
Modern issues are also evident. "I used to be a doctor until they upped my malpractice insurance," one servant says.
Don't worry about the confusion in identities. This is a play to sit back and enjoy.
As W.C. Fields said on his deathbed, when asked how he felt, "Dying is easy, comedy is hard."
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