Archives for June 2023

You go, buddy! Oscar Derkx shakin’ it as Orlando in As You Like it.
(Photo: Tim Matheson. Costume: Carmen Alatorre)

It’s wonderful. There are holes in it. But it’s still wonderful.

When I first saw director Daryl Cloran’s Beatles-inspired adaptation of As You Like It in its premiere at Bard on the Beach five years ago, I was smitten. Cloran has cut half of Shakespeare’s text and inserted Beatles songs. I thought that was a terrible idea when I first heard about it, but I was quickly won over in the flesh.

For most of the first act of this reworked remount, I was, once again, unabashedly delirious. I kept thinking to myself, “Actors are such transcendent creatures!”

In the story, the power-hungry Dame Frances — she’s usually a duke, but Jennifer Lines is playing the part here — has banished her sister Dame Senior from the court. In Cloran’s telling, the court is Vancouver in the 60s and the Forest of Arden, where Senior and her retinue seek refuge, becomes the Okanagan.

When Dame Frances also banishes Dame Senior’s daughter Rosalind — on threat of death — Rosalind and her beloved cousin Celia (Frances’s daughter) also hightail it in the general direction of the peach orchards. Hearing the news of his brother’s plot to kill him, so does Orlando, a disinherited young courtier, shortly after he and Rosalind have locked google-eyes with one another.

Because this is Shakespeare, Rosalind disguises herself as a youth named Ganymede and, when Ganymede meets Orlando in the Okanagan, he offers to teach Orlando how to cope with the vicissitudes of women.

Oscar Derkx’s Orlando is the stuff of dreams: all innocence, but possessed of precise comic timing — just wait till you see him struggling to find words when he’s first trying to converse with Rosalind. With emotional fearlessness and musical skill, Derkx hurls himself into numbers, including “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. And, in one of the evening’s most extraordinary moments, you can see his Orlando choosing to take the plunge into the sexual unknown of courting the boy/girl Ganymede.