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http://www.omniture.com --> Email Story to a Friend June 18, 2006 'Wives' goes through the looking glass The Merry Wives of Windsor" has always been a fish-out-of-water story, but has seldom been as striking as in the production that kicked off the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's outdoor season Friday night. This time Falstaff goes right through the looking glass. "Merry Wives" is a Rodney Dangerfield of the Canon, 400 years of no respect, a slight farce that relies on fat-man jokes. It takes a long time to get going, weighted down by that ridiculous duel sub-plot. The best thing in the play — Sir John Falstaff — is a shadow of the fat knight of the Henry IV plays. One suspects the tradition that it was dashed off quickly at the command of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see "Falstaff in love," was put about by early Bardophiles seeking to explain away the play. It has remained popular with audiences, however. Even second-rate Falstaff can be more compelling than first-rate whatever, and there's all that slapstick and all those goofy characters. What do you do with such a slumgullion? Director Andrew Tsao took it right over the top and into a wonderland-Windsor in day-glo and highlighter-yellow, a world in which scenic designer Richard Hay and costume designer Susan Mickey apparently collaborated with the Mad Hatter. Tsao, who has a long list of television credits, is in his day job the guiding spirit of R37, a California-based touring company that mixes dynamic movement, multi-media and sound with adapted Shakespeare. From the big, opening number — a musical dramatization of Falstaff's abuse of Shallow (Richard Elmore) that prefigures what we hear in the first scene — we are in a dreamland of orange sherbet and raspberry Jell-O where we might believe six impossible things before breakfast. This is not Falstaff's father's Windsor. Down on his luck and carousing at the Garter Inn, Falstaff (G. Valmont Thomas) hits on the idea of seducing not one but two wives of rich Windsor burghers, Mistress Ford (Tyler Layton) and Mistress Page (Shona Tucker), each of whom is said to control the purse strings of her house. Getting wind of Falstaff's designs, the merry wives plot their revenge. Indeed, the story seems to exist for the spectacle of the fat knight hoisted on his own petard. This is the only Shakespeare play set in an English town in Elizabethan times, the only one in which nearly all the main characters are middle-class people, and it's written almost exclusively in prose. Thomas is a wonderful Falstaff, scheming and mugging, romping and stomping, all lust and bluster. Padded out to the requisite two yards at the waist, wild-haired and wild, he underscores the scrofulous knight's delusions (these beautiful women would want this guy?) with a wickedly absurd gleam he can apparently summon to his eyes at will. But he is a stranger in a strange land, and it conspires against him. It's as if Shallow (Richard Elmore), Slender (Shad Willingham), Page (Tony DeBruno), the Host (Erik LaRay Harvey) and the other Windsor denizens are all in a vast conspiracy to foil the fat knight, and not just Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. They move and dance through this parallel world as if it's an amusing joke they're sharing with us, and Falstaff doesn't get it. Most spectacular among the comic grostesques are Doctor Caius (Armando Duran) and his servant Mistress Quickly (Judith-Marie Bergan). Caius, decked out like Elton John's less conservative brother, speaks in a hilarious pseudo-French/pidgin English, by gar, that's as goofy as Welshman Sir Hugh Evans' (Brad Whitmore) butchery of the Queen's English. Quickly is a cross between Tinkerbell, Cruella de Vil and a giant feather duster. Bergan's loopy portrayal makes what's always a good role into a terrific one. All these strange prankster/characters move through a comic, neo-Brechtian world in which they invite us not to identify with their preposterous problems but to share the joke from which Falstaff has been excluded: Nothing here is real; raspberry Jell-O forever. They know it (wink, wink), and we know it — we are in fact being invited to reflect on our own absurd situation — but Falstaff doesn't. This peculiar sensation was only amplified by lighting and technical problems that at one point required the actors to leave the stage for a few minutes. Following the interruption, Layton and Tucker returned with a chipper "here-we-are-again" mien as if the whole thing was part of the larger joke. There are standard Shakespeare themes in "Merry Wives" — poses punctured, men outsmarted by women, elders' opposition vanquished by young lovers. The only non-ridiculous male character is Anne Page's suitor Fenton, who is given a saucy dignity by Yorke G. Fryer. For Falstaff's final humiliation at Herne's Oak, his "fairy" tormentors wear pearly music hall costumes of glittery designs on black, which makes the scene quite striking. Wearing Herne's antlers, Falstaff is symbolically slain. Only when the argument of comedy prevails, as it must, and all is forgiven all around, is Falstaff forgiven and included into the larger company. Which is the cue for the entire cast to break into a joyous dance to The Beatles' "Ob La Di Ob La Da." Life goes on. Yes, it does. And it's real when he is. Just maybe, Falstaff gets it. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or [email protected] Advertisement s Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2006 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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