Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: Reverie Theatre Company at the Viaduct, 3111 N. Western Ave.
Phone: (312) 409-6501; $15
Runs through: Feb 15
In the Shakespeare canon, All's Well That Ends Well is rarely performed, for good reason. Take its premise, which makes the rites of Sadie Hawkins Day look downright courtly: after the snobbish Bertram abandons the wife forced on him at royal shotgun, the lovesick Helen pursues her unwilling spouse until she corners him into accepting his marital fate. Her stratagem employs both the old Bedroom Switcheroo AND the likewise mossy False Death Report—the first used to better advantage by our author in Measure For Measure, and the second in The Winter's Tale. But if this overplotted fable sometimes seems composed of outtakes from its creator's notebook—the text also includes a wellborn son's departure delayed by a parent offering homilies even the windy Polonius deemed unnecessary—Chris Pomeroy's direction for this Reverie Theatre Company production also makes for contradictions in concept and quality.
For every cleverly executed scene, such as those surrounding the humiliation of Paroles by his fellow soldiers, we get moments of classroom-level clumsiness, as when a subject kneeling before the king has to scootch around on the floor in that position, her monarch not having the wits to bid her rise after making obeisance. At another point, Helen enters in the manner of a Gower Champion musical number, complete with a line of chorus boys, incongruously accompanied by Victoria DeIorio's synthesizer-based New Age-elegant incidental music. Female characters are dressed in ottoman-empire garb at home, debutante gowns for formal occasions, the jesting Lavatch is tarted out in Haight-Ashbury regalia, and the armies in futuristic uniforms featuring cargo pants and football shoulder-guards.
The performances are as uneven as their environment. Eva Wilhelm makes a WB-worthy Helen, while the regal Patrice Egleston and peppery Mary Johnson render their respective materfamiliae appropriately wise and loyal. Tom Bateman's Lavatch struggles to avoid being upstaged by his costume, Alfred C. Kemp finds a few redeeming subtextual fillips in the thankless role of the spoiled Bertram, as do Miles Polaski and Mark Pracht as a pair of prankish GIs. But only Scott Hamilton Westerman as the slippery Paroles and Stephen Fedo as the stuffy Lafeu, appear sufficiently comfortable with their characters to have fun with them.