Shakespeare With Some Voguing

The Public’s Twelfth Night is pleasant but a little shallow.

- SARA HOLDREN

THE LAST TIME I wrote about Twelfth Night at the Public's Delacorte Theater, I took issue with a performance that sacrificed the play's rich ambiguities for a relentless singalong perkiness, a too-wide smile that, while part of a meaningful civic project, lacked theatrical teeth. Now, the whirligig of time has brought all three of us back around: Twelfth Night, in a fancy new production directed by Saheem Ali and featuring Lupita Nyong'o, Sandra Oh, and Peter Dinklage; the Delacorte, after 18 months dark for an $85 million makeover; and me, after my own hiatus from bright lights and aisle seats, now writing this with a baby asleep in my lap.

It's good to be back, and the Delacorte looks great, but I'm beginning to worry that when it comes to Shakespeare in the Park, the Public Theater employs some kind of tacit house mandate, at least where the plays classed as comedies are concerned. Fun will be had. Whatever the nuances of the text, the audience must end the show clapping along to an upbeat curtain-call jamboree. Ali's take on the tale of Viola (Nyong'o)—separated from her twin brother, Sebastian (played by Nyong'o's real-life sibling Junior Nyong'o), in a shipwreck and then tossed into a dizzy love triangle after disguising herself as the servant boy Cesario—is hip and handsome, like a natty Hinge date who's unfailingly good-natured yet somehow short on sincerity. Maruti Evans's set is a department-store-window splash of crimson, a wide red floor backed by enormous red letters that spell out the play's subtitle, WHAT YOU WILL: Illyria not as place but as metatheatrical wink. Last Twelfth Night, Shaina Taub supplied a surplus of cheekily vaudevillian jazz-funk. This time, Michael Thurber has composed a slinkier, more ambient set of tunes for Shakespeare's lyrics, delivered here mostly by Moses Sumney as an electric-guitar-toting Feste who looks like an escapee from a Dries Van Noten runway.