[NEohioPAL] Review of "Love's Labour's Lost" at Great Lakes Theater

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Great Lakes Theater finds the joy in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ 



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics



In her program notes for Great Lakes Theater’s current production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” director Tyne Rafaeli calls the play “a polyphonic explosion – a feast of style and language.” 



An explosion it is, but the writing is more smorgasbord than feast.  



Rather than choose one of the poetic styles that happened to be in fashion in London in 1589, the young and cocky Will Shakespeare included them all:  sonnets, rhyming couplets, lengthy quatrains, puns in English and in Latin, a seemingly endless supply of alliterations, and a constant stream of quick-witted wordplay.  



There are more speeches by more people in this lesser comedy then in most of Shakespeare’s later works, as well.  And by writing a play that is both a celebration and condemnation of poetry and puns, there are plenty of inside jokes about language whose meaning and cleverness have not traveled well across the centuries.   Starting with the title. 



It is little wonder that this overstuffed and comparatively unrefined play, with its boisterous opening and sober conclusion, went largely unproduced for much of its early history.  Few theater companies have the talent to do this play and fewer still have it in the bulk required to do it well.



The Great Lakes Theater does and they most certainly do.  They manage to turn all the heightened language and immense loquaciousness into a joyous affair.  



For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/. 
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