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Review: 'Twelfth Night' delivers a rollicking feast of Will Sunday May 15, 2005 at 2:00 AM Dec 18, 2010 at 1:42 PM BILL VARBLE,Mail Tribune SOU's theater department offers a surreal concoction that's worth savoring Shakespeare as dinner theater? There's something you don't see every day. Southern Oregon University's new production of Twelfth Night, directed by Scott Kaiser, is so full of warmth and brio it almost floats off the stage some time after the chicken breasts in balsamic vinaigrette and before the chocolate mousse. If you're a Bardophile you haven't seen Viola and Sebastian and company quite like this. And if you're new to the Bard, this is a place to climb aboard. Craig Hudson's fantastical Illyria on-stage looks like a surreal De Chirico cityscape welcoming you to dinner. A sun-drenched piazza is framed by fine buildings reflecting the light of a surreal sun and glittering sea. The surf whispers. Walls soar at crazy angles. Nothing is square or plumb. This is a place where reality mixes with illusion. — When the dishes go away we enter an Illyria in which Feste plays the accordion, a love-struck Malvolio sings Someone to Watch Over Me, and people break into dance at the drop of a hat. Who better to sing Friends in Low Places than Olivia's roaring uncle, Sir Toby Belch? Actors pop out of upper windows in the palazzo to ring bells or strike gongs to underscore key moments often having to do with Eros. Eros is very busy here, even if he is clouded in fantasy. As are most of these characters. Peter Diseth's primping Orsino thinks he's in love with the lovely Olivia, but he's really in love with being in love, as Diseth suggests in striking mock-romantic poses. Kelsi Knudsen's Olivia is in love with grief (seven years of mourning for her brother, she vows). Her grief makes her happy. It is oddly like Orsino's love, which makes him miserable. Of course grief goes quickly out the window when Olivia lays eyes on Daria Lisandrelli, who projects an androgynous beauty that works as both the plucky Viola and the youth Cesario. Kaiser is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's head of text and has adapted sterner fare than this (the Henry VI plays last year) in his day job. In his cut-and-paste job on the script, some of his most important choices had to do with some judicious pruning of the Malvolio subplot, especially Malvolio's confinement and torment by the conspirators. That figures in a broadly played production, and this one's as broad as a smarter Comedy of Errors. John Goodson is a comic Malvolio indeed, his dark narcissism submerged in favor of his ambition, in which he fantasizes rising above his station to marry Olivia. He cuts a ridiculous figure in his cross-gartered yellow stockings, grinning luridly, purring like a sex kitten and slipping into his best Busby Berkeley. But this kinder, gentler Malvolio is still sent packing in the end. Costume designer Etai Alves' tailored suits, romantic dresses and rakish hats stake out a stylish modernism, say, circa 1920s. Feste wears an orange and green sportcoat with a bit of a sunburst thing. Malvolio catches Sir Toby's cakes and ale speech in longjohns and a tuxedo. Speaking Shakespeare is notoriously difficult, and college actors don't have the vocal chops of the pros. That quibble aside, performances are up to the production. Scott Fullerton, in pajamas and bathrobe, is a blustering bear as the arch-plotter Belch. As his drinking buddy/sugar daddy Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Doug Reynolds brings style and physical comedy, playing up the old knight's cowardice. Garrett Liggett is a sly, ironic Feste. His humor as a critic is turned up, his role in the gulling of Malvolio dampened. I haven't seen the duel of Viola and Sir Andrew done any funnier. It's slapstick, with giant artists' paintbrushes and duelists reeling around like the Marx Brothers. Kaiser turned to the OSF's U. Jonathan Toppo for fight choreography. Somehow it all fits together into an organic, surreal, comic pastry. When you're hot, everything works. Is it definitive? Of course not. The slightly bitter flavor the play Shakespeare tinged it with is pretty much gone, although it surfaces in the ending song. But Shakespeare is not a museum, and a production like this shows that after 400 years, there are yet new ways to bake the old boy up. This one takes a chance and pulls it off. It shines. If you go Twelfth Night plays Thursdays through Sundays at SOU through May 28, with a matinee at 2 p.m. May 21. Tickets are & 36;22 to & 36;29. Call 552-6348. Reach reporter Bill Varbleat 776-4478 or e-mail