Directed by Melia Bensussen, the almost imperceptibly cut proceedings (ASP’s briskly paced show clocks in at 2:20, including one 15-minute intermission) are set in what looks like the hold of a ship, with a curving, seaweed-pocked slide at one end, and a channel of water running through the center. The matching white, three-piece suits that Viola and Sebastian wear are stained seaweed green on the shoulders and the trouser bottoms, and Feste, in a fool’s motley overcoat, has the same stained trouser bottoms. It’s as if England were standing in seawater up to her ankles - which, in 1601, may well have been how Shakespeare felt.

Water is also essential to the play’s sense of identity, which is, to say the least, fluid. Believing Sebastian dead, Viola assumes a male identity - Cesario - and enters the service of Duke Orsino, who’s convinced he’s in love with the Countess Olivia. Olivia is in mourning for her father and her brother, so she professes no interest in Orsino, but she can’t keep her eyes off Cesario, who for his (uh, her) part is hopelessly devoted to Orsino. Throw in sea captain Antonio’s abject affection for Sebastian (not dead, of course) and you have a play in which all our desires are dreams, a play whose title befits the 12th and final night of Christmas, when the Lord of Misrule (here represented by Sir Toby Belch and cronies Maria and Fabian) rains, reigns, and runs riot. - Jeffrey Gantz

(Read the rest of the review HERE)

Twelfth Night is my favorite of Bill’s Comedies. I love it love it love it. But Sadly I never got to perform it. But once I got to perform a dialogue from it at my drama camp.

My dialogue (well it’s mostly a monologue):

Act I Scene I

DUKE ORSINO: If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

CURIO: Will you go hunt, my lord?

DUKE ORSINO: What, Curio?

CURIO: The hart.

DUKE ORSINO: Why, so I do, the noblest that I have:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn’d into a hart;
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me.