At: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre,
800 E. Grand Ave. at Navy Pier
Phone: (312) 595-5600; $48-$58
Runs through: June 1
Imagination can be channeled to a purpose, but an artist's 'fancy' is generally thought to be more capricious. And nowhere did Shakespeare exercise his fancy more than in cobbling together post-Renaissance Romance and Greek Tragedy to fashion The Winter's Tale: its story begins with the King of Sicilia suspecting that his wife is canoodling behind his back with his ally, the King of Bohemia. The targets of the royal wrath are punished, some with exile and some with death, he himself receiving his comeuppance after daring to defy Apollo's oracle.
Sixteen years later, we meet the daughter he condemned to be abandoned, now adopted by a sheep-farmer and courted by none other than the son of the aforementioned Bohemian King, a father no less bigoted than his long-ago persecutor. But through plot machinations that even the author admits 'should be hooted at like an old tale,' everything ends happily for everyone still left alive.
Faced with ambiance pulling in such bipolar opposition as this, director Michael Bogdanov solves the conflict by pulling in several more: decorating his prologue in Christmas-card Victorian and a quasi-Stephen Foster ballad, dressing the Sicilian court in stark Art Deco, opening the second act with exposition rendered in hip-hop, and garbing Bohemia's courtiers in Edwardian sporting gear for their excursion among the rubes—in this production, Appalachian-accented peasants wild and woolly as their livestock, their onstage activity encompassing a sheep-shearing festival enlivened by a strolling band of musicians. All these elements conspire to keep us too dazzled to address issues of authenticity or plausibility.
Anchoring the convoluted plot—did I mention a statue's spooky re-animation?—are uniformly capable performances provided by a company of Chicago Shakespeare regulars. John Reeger and Kevin Gudahl contribute fine baritone-tenor harmonies as the two misguided monarchs, with Greg Vinkler's steadfast Camillo and Susan Hart's peppery Paulina supplying counterpoint rhythms. James Fitzgerald's inventive business and Irish accent, along with an infectious ditty by Alaric Jans, mitigates the flimflamming Autolycus' tendency to long-windiness. But the tag-team honors go to Robert Scogin and Joe Foust as two generations of befuddled shepherds caught amid a stampede of lambs gone astray.