Hudson
Valley Shakespeare Festival
By Ross Rice
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...together
with director Terrence O’Brien, an ex-colleague from San Francisco’s
American Conservatory Theatre, they enlisted the actors of New York-based
Twenty-Ninth Str eet Project, and staged an outdoor performance
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Manitoga, that unfortunately
was mostly attended by blustery weather, which eventually forced
them inside a local high-school gymnasium for the last two shows.
The performances were very well received despite the dif culties,
and an organizing commitee was recruited from fans in attendance.
The following years found them moving the festival to Boscobel,
incorporating and achieving non-prot and Equity (Actors union)
status. Nineteen years later, it’s still going strong.
O’Brien
has maintained a high quality level of performances as artistic
director, auditioning for cast members in New York as well as upstate.
A healthy balance of seasoned professionals and promising interns
and apprentices round out the uniformly excellent casts. With two
shows per season, he admits to making sure one of them is one of
the big ones: a Romeo & Juliet, or Macbeth, while the other
is more challenging, or even obscure (this year, it’s the
perennial favorite As You Like It utilizing a country/cowboy theme,
directed by Kurt Rhoads.) alternating with Richard III. A 1999 version
of the lesser-known Titus Andronicus comes to O’Brien’s
mind as one of the more succesful endeavors of the company over
the years. Although he employs occasional modern ourishes in his
presentation of the material, particularly full ensemble dance sequences
as momentary relief, he maintains a pleasing ambiguity of time and
place, which is reinforced by the polyglot multi-cultural costume
design and soundscapes, and variety of idiomatic mannerisms utilized
by the cast. The result: fresh and accessible readings of the Bard’s
classic work, out under the open sky.....
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