As You Like It (Classic Stage Company) NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (139)
See it if you want to see the great Ellen Burstyn deliver one of the Bard's great speeches ("All the world's a stage...")
Don't see it if you're a Shakespeare purist.
See it if Like John Doyle and his minimal theater alike full scale productionsnd good Shakespeare I enjoyed it
Don't see it if Looking for full scale production
See it if You'd like a charming, relaxed, slightly off-beat production. Carefully diversified -- each of the 4 couples is racially mixed. Lovely songs
Don't see it if You like Shakespeare done conventionally with British accents and are jarred by women in men's roles and racial diversity in many parts.
See it if you like the idea of a compressed AYLI. It is short. If you want to see Andre DeShields and Ellen Burstyn. You want to hear Schwartz's music
Don't see it if you are looking for traditional Shakespeare, you don't like it when actors talk fast, or if you don't like Shakespeare, in general.
See it if Only have 90 minutes to see As You Like It "light". Still retain some of the poetry.
Don't see it if Don't know the play as too much may have been excised.
See it if you enjoy John Doyle productions; its a truncated version of the show with some (not enough) music. Acting is really good.
Don't see it if you like your Shakespeare funny--there are few laughs here, despite the stellar cast
See it if You love the play and want to see it in a different framework.
Don't see it if You like your Shakespeare pure. Read more
See it if You want to see a different take on a wonderful play. You love Ellen Burstyn.
Don't see it if You want to see and feel real chemistry between the lovers in the show. You dislike cuts to Shakespeare. Read more
Critic Reviews (38)
"All the ingredients are here for a delightful skip and swing through the woods into love and marriage, but strangely it just doesn’t really grab hold. Even with the wonderfully fun characterizations...the language doesn’t feel wondrous enough...The poetry of Shakespeare’s 'As You Like It' isn’t there, and what is there is not to my liking. It stumbles in the woods, and no amount of colorful globes of light, rainbow umbrellas, or jaunty tunes will save the story from falling on its face."
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"'As You Like It' is a comedy, but you wouldn’t know that from the dearth of laughter surrounding Doyle’s lifeless production...The play plods along with all the zest of a dusty tome...In general, this production of 'As You Like It' suffers from a lack of directorial clarity and specificity. It’s pleasing to look at it, but the various plot points don’t land and the events don’t connect with one another...It’s inoffensive, but bland. There is no passion, no momentum, and no tension."
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"Under John Doyle’s exacting direction, the ensemble cast is uniformly excellent. Their performances–believable and authentic–carefully explore their characters’ levels of complexity and the engaging conflicts that drive the comedy’s fluid plot. The production is marred, however, by the inability of the audience to hear the dialogue...Overall, the Classic Stage Company’s 'As You Like It' is a fitting addition to the Company’s fifty years of excellence in theatre."
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“Charming but not altogether successful…Some scenes and characters have been trashed or condensed...John Doyle, hewing to his signature style of paring away as much as possible of the script…Doyle's bare, wood-planked, brick-backgrounded set is saved from boredom by a delightfully attractive arrangement of multiple, varisized lighting globes…Stephen Schwartz composed the wonderful, jazz-inflected tunes…Burstyn not only makes every word count, she lands many laughs.”
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"There’s something admirably loose at the way Doyle tells the story...Because the entire enterprise has the come-what-may feel to it, it has an overall easy appeal. Much of it comes across as understated even at times when the characters are comically overstated...Do notice that at the finale the four couples united are mixed. Is a statement being made? It is, whether intentional or not, and certainly it’s a welcome vision for these racism-stuffed parlous days."
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"Fails to elicit any magic...The whole CSC version seems changed and not for the better. The show comes alive when Schwartz’s tunes are sung or played by fiddle, upright bass, and piano. The question becomes, why not musicalize this piece, or at least give us more?...Burstyn is a low-key Jacques, but she has that 'it' factor. Even so, her speech 'all the world’s a stage' just sort of fizzles and this 100-minute production just seems longer than long."
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"Doyle gives us a hyper-whimsical slant...The trouble is it’s too whimsical, if such a thing is possible...Doyle remembers the goofiness, but the stakes in the romance of the leads and the redemption of the refugees are not very high...There are moments of delight, chiefly during the musical interludes...The leads fail to offer much weight...The action is so short and fast, not much registers in this soap-bubble Shakespeare."
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"There’s a lot of hell-raising, some of it funny, going on in director Doyle’s staging...But is it Shakespeare?...Doyle’s cast plunges into his conception with enthusiasm, and in particular cases, with special acting talent...While there are doses of charm and humor, the beauty of the Bard’s language is mostly buried. And by truncating the work way beyond some prudent editing, we do not get the play interpreted close to what it probably was meant to be by the author."
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