Review: 'Love's Labors Lost' a fun frantic frolic

Sticks and stones might break our bones, but words will make us fools in the exhilarating production of William Sheakespeare's 1597, late-Elizabethan era, comedy "Love's Labors Lost," playing at the Ula Love Doughty Carousel Theatre at the University of Tennessee through March 15.

In set designer Jack Magaw's magnificently minimal theater-in-the-round presentation that gives Sheakspeare's river of words an iridescent glow, director John Sipes' vision of transplanting Love's Labors' whimsical kingdom of Navarre to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s is successful beyond measure.

Costume designer Marianne Custer's outfits conjured images as diverse as a Zelda Fitzgeraldian lawn party for the Princess of France and her retinue, a country clubbish King Ferdinand and his court, a Buster Keaton/Charley Chaplinish Costard and Harpo Marxian Dull. Then there was Don Armado as Salvador Dali caught in a mid-flight, bullring collision with the matador disguise of a Castilian Inspector Clouseau.

"Love's" cast of characters are as much a visual comic feast as their words are music for the funny bone.

And that says nothing of scholarly Nathaniel’s turn as a Shinto priest/Roman centurion, the hilarious brilliance of whatever Moth showed up in, including his impromptu sumo wrestler diaper striptease, or the noblemens' ingenious bearded Cossack boars at the masked ball. That pigs (as in the male chauvinist type) were wooing the ladies’ hinds (female stags) was, no doubt, meant as a visual double entendre. After all, the whole play is about a 16th century version of chasing …well, you know.

If all this is beginning to sound like an overload, it's merely a Cliffs Notes version of the saturation experience that Clarence Brown Theatre artistic director Calvin Maclean has put together as the perfect antidote for these bleak economic times, at least for a couple of hours.

There is not a drifter in the cast, nor is there room to name all of them here. From the undergraduate students, to the graduate theatre majors and the professionals, there wasn't a moment I cringed because one of them could have done something better, including when several of them broke character by breaking out laughing when Mark Allen Moreno's Moth almost lost his drawers.

That moment seemed right because the rest of us were laughing too.

Since it's expected and impossible to avoid names in a review, I'll start with David Kortemeier's brilliantly bizarre Don Armado, voiced with a mangled lisp and warped Spanish accent..

Steve Fitchpatrick’s Costard, Carol Mayo Jenkins' Holofernes, Donald Thorne’s Nathaniel and Charles R. Miller’s Boyet should get notice too, as should Jonathan Visser’s preppy King Ferdinand with Gerald Ford’s sense of balance.

But then, so should everyone else!

The game of social wits is on. Don't miss it!

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
Want to use this article? Click here for options!

© 2009 Knoxville.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.