The Merry Wives of Windsor is a very silly play, so I didn’t have high expectations going into this production. But director Rebecca Northan and her company have exploded the text, substantially reinventing it and making the silliness about AI influencers, chiropractors, and soccer (among other things). Their strategy works. This mounting is hilarious. Bard on the Beach has a hit on its hands.
In Shakespeare’s original, which is set (vaguely) in the fifteenth century, Sir John Falstaff is a fat old knight down on his luck. When he arrives in Windsor, he decides to seduce both Mistresses Ford and Page to get his mitts on their husbands’ money. But the women realize that Falstaff has sent them identical love letters and immediately plot their revenge for the insult. Promising assignations that do not come to fruition, they exact that revenge three times.
In the most thematically substantial portion of the text, Mr. Ford and Mr. Page catch wind of their wives’ games, which brings up the issue of men’s sexual control — well, everything control — over women. Mr. Page is confident in his wife’s fidelity, but Mr. Ford is not (“I would sooner trust a thief with my wallet than my wife with herself.”)
In the subplot, Mistress Page’s daughter, Anne, is pursued by a reluctant, unlettered youth named Slender (her father’s favourite choice for her hand) and a Frenchman, Dr. Caius (her mother’s favourite). But Anne is in love with Fenton.
In a bizarre but rewarding nod to FIFA, Norton and company have moved the action to the Windsor Community Center in the soccer-mad and fictional Vancouver suburb of Windsor — in the present day. Falstaff is a gone-to-seed soccer star; Anne and Fenton are captains of the men’s and women’s soccer teams. Mistress Quickly, a servant to Dr. Caius in the original and the hub of many intrigues, reigns over the community centre’s front desk.
The acting company is stellar.
I can only find film and TV acting credits for Raf Rogers, who’s playing Dr. Caius, but stylistically, he’s perfect here, endowing the character with a broad Québecois accent and the passionate intensity of a petulant two-year-old. (In the rewritten text, the running gag about Caius being a chiropractor and, therefore, not a real doctor, is a gift that just keeps giving.)
Radiantly confident as Anne Page and equally rewarding in her well-observed take on a servant named Simple, whom she turns into a cool-kid slacker, Rachel Angco is another welcome newcomer.
Turning Slender into an AI influencer is a stroke of genius that captures both the character’s shallowness and his shyness about social engagement, including wooing. Actor Sara Vickruck knows exactly what they’re doing with this: Vickruck’s characterization combines big, hip, hollow gestures and the status-laden language of social media with the vulnerability of underlying bafflement. Vickruck has become such a confident Shakespearean performer.
Steffanie Davis is playing Mistress Quickly and Jacob Leonard’s main role is as Falstaff’s embittered servant Pistol. Leonard made me — and, it seemed, everybody else — guffaw with a one-line cross that I’ll let you discover for yourself and, when Quickly and Pistol fall for each other and sing “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars… Oh, baby, I’m still getting goosebumps thinking about it! Davis is a phenomenal belter — and she does a fantastic variation on the theme of “sexpot” — but I had no idea that Leonard could also really sing. When these two went at it, singin’, dancin’, and flickin’ their long locks, I could have stayed in that show all night.
I also want to specifically sing the praises of Craig Erickson’s Mr. Ford. The character’s exasperation is a power source in this production and Erickson brings the house down with his version of “Dancing on My Own”.
Northan uses a lot of well-chosen pop music to keep the energy pumping in this Merry Wives and Amir Ofek’s flexible, wide-open set also speeds things along, allowing him to create a bunch of community-centre settings, including the lobby and women’s changing room, without pausing for energy-sucking set changes.
In one of my favourite directorial flourishes, when the men of Windsor turn into an impulsive but innocent gang, Northan endows them with simultaneous movement, giving physical form to their group-think mindlessness. And there are all sorts of individual bits of comic business. Erickson’s Ford has no idea how to unroll his yoga mat, for instance. (That bit keeps going on, rewardingly, for a while.)
I’m aware that I haven’t talked about the usual stars of Merry Wives. Ashley Wright’s Falstaff is amiable, Jennifer Lines’s Mistress Page playful, Melissa Oei’s Mistress Ford confidently sexy, but, in this production, in which eccentricity reigns, these straighter characterizations demanded less of my attention. This is not a knock on these actors; it’s an observation about the dynamics of this production.
Every artist involved with this mounting should be very proud of it. May they all enjoy a wild ride this summer.
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR By William Shakespeare. Directed by Rebecca Northan. A Bard on the Beach production running in rep in the Mainstage tent until September 19. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: Steffanie Davies as Mistress Quickly with Angie Angco as Simple (Photo by Emily Cooper. Costumes by Barbara Clayden.)
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