Something (aside from heat) for everyone at Festival

Friday, July 15, 2005 | 8:32 a.m.

The 2005 Utah Shakespearean Festival has something for anyone seeking cooler temperatures after a three-hour drive to Cedar City, Utah, and plays that span almost 500 years.

Following are reviews of the performances during the Festival's fall season:

"Romeo and Juliet:" Blood feuds, a secret marriage, herbal potions that cause deep sleep, and daggers delivering death brought "Romeo and Juliet" to its inevitable conclusion in a fresh production directed by Kate Buckley.

Set designer Bill Forrester's spare scenery, in keeping with classical Shakespearean staging, allows the characters of Juliet (Tiffany Scott), Romeo (Paul Hurley), Juliet's nurse (Leslie Brott) and hot-headed Mercutio (Ashley Smith) to move and talk quick and light, just like young lovers or teenagers in street brawls do in real life.

This production opens with fierce fighting between youthful swordsmen. The action seldom stops until the end.

Although the teenager lovers die in Shakespeare's inevitable ending, the lovers are not tragic figures, festival founder Fred Adams said. Their deaths are rooted in the failure of the two families to end their feud.

The humor and hot-headedness between the families are played broader in the first half of this play with clashes between Romeo and his friends against Mercutio, foreshadowing the dark end.

Veteran festival actor Leslie Brott shines as Nurse to Scott's Juliet, played with youthfulness and vigor. As she searches and yearns for Romeo, Juliet reaches to touch her heart's desire by dropping to her knees and thrusting a hand through the balcony.

Buckley's energetic and emotional production brought a fresh pitch to a romance doomed from the start.

"Doctor Faustus": Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare's until he was killed in a brawl before he turned 30, put the devil in the details when he wrote "Doctor Faustus."

Marlowe's Faustus is the first tragedy written in the English language, notes director Howard Jensen.

"Like Marlowe himself, Faustus's longing for limitless knowledge is the apotheosis of Renaissance longing," Jensen said.

Jensen adapted Faustus, pitting Marlowe, a brawler, counterfeiter, atheist and possible spy, against Shakespeare's "Gentle Will" image.

Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare is clear here.

Donald Sage Mackay carries most of the play as Faustus, tormented by temptation and thoughts of redemption, showing his true colors with a weak will that seals his fate in the end.

But Lucifer's lieutenant, Mephistopheles, is the messenger from hell, a place that exists wherever heaven does not.

Mephistopheles (Ben Livingston) appears in greenish-yellow hue, black encircling his eyes, green claws curled in midair after God cast him out of heaven.

Even Faustus is taken aback by the demon's appearance, signing his soul away for 24 years as Mephistopheles grants his every wish on earth.

The first wish is granted when Mephistopheles changes into the robes of a Franciscan monk to appear less hideous and asks Faustus, "What would thou hast me do?"

Mackay noted that he found "a certain charm" to Marlowe's verse, tense and sparse, coiled like a spring that thrusts the action forward leaving the audience with a case of the creeps as demons disappear and re-appear in clouds of flame and smoke.

Once again Forrester's set design enhances the drama, from walls of books in the magician's study to fiery flames flashing, trap doors opening and a clock that charts time passing until the doctor of the black arts goes to his doom in a smoky submergence under the stage.

Costume designer Linda Pisano dresses demons as well as Alexander the Great, Helen of Troy, magicians, a pope, the Seven Deadly Sins and iridescently green-skinned underworld devils.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream": The last thing hyper-intellectual director Kathleen Conlin yearned to do as casting director and associate artistic director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival was direct a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

The dean of fine arts at the University of Illinois at Champagne said she didn't get it. What was Shakespeare trying to tell us in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"?

Conlin said that her own spiritual side opened her academic persona to the magic, allowing a childlike Fairyland to emerge in this summer's production, which includes a shimmering, towering mirror and glittering stars and moon on the set.

Michael Sharon, formerly of "Jubilee" at Bally's, brings strength and majesty to both Theseus (duke of Athens) and Oberon (king of the fairies) in a believable portrait.

Anne Newhall as Hippolyta, Amazon queen, and Titania, queen of the fairies, shines with energy and wit.

However, it was Corliss Preston as Puck that mesmerized the audience, adding a charm and magic to this character that is often undermined by an actor playing the part filled with too much mischief bordering on cruelty.

Lovers and fairies make merry mixups in the woods, until Puck and Oberon prevail, restoring order and celestial harmony to both imaginary and earthly worlds of the play.

"Love's Labour's Lost": Young lovers seeking truth and virtue reveal a lust for life, even as a nailing French king overshadows the poetry of this play. Director Timothy Douglas dug deeper to reveal the unconscious march of everyone's mortality.

When King of Navarre (Lea CoCo) with his three lords, Longaville (Brian Normoyle), Dumaine (Matthew-Lee Erlbach) and Berowne (David Ivers), resolve to spend three years in isolation and studies, they break their youthful promise almost as soon as the princess of France (Melinda Pfundstein) and her three ladies arrive.

Ivers and Ben Livingston as a fantastical Spaniard steal the show in this jousting of wits and mistaken identities.

"Oh these are barren tasks," Berowne says of once-a-week fasts, three hours' sleep a night and no women.

Corliss Preston portrays the lady involved with Berowne and Leslie Brott as Holofernia, a school mistress, tosses words and their meaning with exaggerated and hilarious care.

Costard, a clown played by the delightful Ryan Schabach, stays in character no matter where he appears onstage.

Shakespeare wrote the plays presented this summer season as he began his writing career for London stages. The Utah adaptations prove energetic and exuberant, bringing a freshness to every production.

"Camelot": Prepare to fall under Merlyn's (Peter Sham) spell as King Arthur (Brian Vaughn), Guenevere (Christine Williams) and Launcelot (Michael Sharon) reach for the stars before the love triangle shatters illusions.

Vaughn, who has returned to the Utah Shakespearean Festival for 14 years, has arrived in his role as King Arthur as a solid, yet versatile, actor with star power.

As the play opens, Arthur stares from the limbs of a tree, gazing in the distance in search of the love of his life, coached by Merlyn, who has advised the youth and taught him how to think.

The Knights of the Round Table, the secret romance between Guenevere and Launcelot and the fighting for just causes reach a nexus when Mordred (Aaron Galligan-Stierle), Arthur's illegitimate son, arrives and tries to discredit his father and grab the throne.

Mordred traps Guenevere and Launcelot in her chamber, then bursts in and arrests Guenevere for treason as Launcelot escapes.

Sentenced to burn at the stake under Arthur's rules, Guenevere's survival and that of Camelot hinges on the king's actions. When his dream shatters, Arthur realizes that the only hope for his ideals lies in the next generation.

"Stones in his Pockets": Experimental and tempermental, the work of new playwrights debuting at the Utah Shakespearean Festival are always a gamble.

"This is one of those plays you will absolutely love, or you will absolutely hate, but you will not be lukewarm," festival founder Fred Adams said by way of introduction to Irish playwright Marie Jones 1996 work.

Two characters act out a dozen roles, Brian Vaughn as Charlie Conlon and David Ivers as Jay Quinn, a couple country boys hired as extras by a film company making a movie, "The Quiet Valley," in County Kerry, Ireland.

Director J.R. "Jim" Sullivan said the play did not survive in New York City after the 9/11 terror attacks. Particularly, the language will be offensive to some.

"I didn't think it would happen here," Sullivan said of the production in the Cedar City setting.

The play's theme of the extras as nobodies mirrors modern mass culture grindng individuals into the ground. Films make all the choices for audiences while the stage brings language alive through imagination, Sullivan said.

As Ivers and Vaughn enact actors, a director, a producer and other characters with a gesture, an expression or a change of voice, the audience sometimes laughed, or sometimes remained silent.

In the end, however, comedy saves humanity.

"I think humor is how we endure life," Sullivan said.

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