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Rating: 
Summary: Good Shakespeare, silly production
Review: I begin to grow very testy with producers and directors who insist that Shakespeare is presentable in any costume except Elizabethan. So I once saw Caesar shot to death by 1930-senators and then heard characters speak of the "daggers" that stabbed Caesar. Now, the Arkangel production of <The Two Gentlemen of Verona> is one of the best acted in the series so far. The gentlemen (Michael Maloney and Damian Lewis) and their beloveds (Saskia Wickham and Lucy Robinson) are nicely differentiated in voice and delivery, Thorio (Desmond Barrit) appropriately obnoxious, and Launce (John Woodvine) sufficiently earthy to convince us that they are "into their roles" and convince us that all this silliness is important to them. (The Dog, however, is rotten.)Take for example the giggling and the "girl talk" between Julia and her maid as they joke about the cod piece that will be a part of the disguise. And yet at every turn--indeed even as background to several scenes--we have a 1960s lounge combo, saxophone very prominent, displacing us to a time when the very expression "cod piece" needs a footnote. And what should be the most beautiful moment in the play--and hear it on the rival Harper Collins Audio version to see if I am not wrong--is the lovely "Who is Sylvia," here sung in a horrible jazzy version totally out of keeping with the language, morals, and what we imagine in our minds to be the costumes. Why, in heaven's sake, should an audio recording have to misdirect us like this? In the Arkangel edition of "All's Well That Ends Well," we are greeted by the sound of a modern piano and actually hear a train pulling out of station later on! Well, in this case there was a stage production a few years earlier that did indeed set the play in a recent era. But on a tape recording...? Yes, I still give this recording 4 stars for the sake of the excellent cast and their director. But PLEASE, no more silliness.
Rating:
Summary: Good Shakespeare, silly production
Review: I begin to grow very testy with producers and directors who insist that Shakespeare is presentable in any costume except Elizabethan. So I once saw Caesar shot to death by 1930-senators and then heard characters speak of the "daggers" that stabbed Caesar. Now, the Arkangel production of is one of the best acted in the series so far. The gentlemen (Michael Maloney and Damian Lewis) and their beloveds (Saskia Wickham and Lucy Robinson) are nicely differentiated in voice and delivery, Thorio (Desmond Barrit) appropriately obnoxious, and Launce (John Woodvine) sufficiently earthy to convince us that they are "into their roles" and convince us that all this silliness is important to them. (The Dog, however, is rotten.)Take for example the giggling and the "girl talk" between Julia and her maid as they joke about the cod piece that will be a part of the disguise. And yet at every turn--indeed even as background to several scenes--we have a 1960s lounge combo, saxophone very prominent, displacing us to a time when the very expression "cod piece" needs a footnote. And what should be the most beautiful moment in the play--and hear it on the rival Harper Collins Audio version to see if I am not wrong--is the lovely "Who is Sylvia," here sung in a horrible jazzy version totally out of keeping with the language, morals, and what we imagine in our minds to be the costumes. Why, in heaven's sake, should an audio recording have to misdirect us like this? In the Arkangel edition of "All's Well That Ends Well," we are greeted by the sound of a modern piano and actually hear a train pulling out of station later on! Well, in this case there was a stage production a few years earlier that did indeed set the play in a recent era. But on a tape recording...? Yes, I still give this recording 4 stars for the sake of the excellent cast and their director. But PLEASE, no more silliness.
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