Shakespeare Meets The Beatles in Milwaukee Rep’s As You Like It

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Image via Milwaukee Rep

As You Like It

Shakespeare was prescient to name this comedy As You Like It. The play speaks well to our moment. It’s the story of a woman disguised as a man who’s pretending to be woman in order to teach the man she loves, who thinks she’s a man, how to best love the woman she actually is.

The result is an unhesitating portrait of female agency with an underlying message that queer love is fine. Moreover, it’s set in a country where power-and-money-mad men have overthrown the rightful government in a coup. They’re in the power now and there’s danger all around but guess what. Love is all we need. There will be an answer. Let it be.

The Milwaukee Rep is presenting As You Like It in an adaptation by the Canadian director Daryl Corlan, who’s replaced over half of Shakespeare’s oft’ cumbersome lines with 20-some songs from The Beatles’ catalogue. Those songs, sung by a variety of characters, function as dialogue and monologue. They carry the action better than Shakespeare’s 16th century poetry, and in a rhythm that’s at least as catchy. It’s been over a week since I read the script and the songs keep running through my head. They’re the songs of my youth.

Storytelling in Song

Cloran describes it this way. “The songs do a lot of the storytelling and character development. It doesn’t feel like a jukebox musical where we pause the story and listen to our favorite songs. The characters work through something with the songs they sing.”

The play premiered in 2018 at Bard on the Beach, a theater company in Vancouver, Canada that produces an annual outdoor summer Shakespeare festival. Two years earlier, Cloran had turned Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost into a prohibition era musical with jazz standards from the 1920s. It was a hit for the festival.

“After it closed,” Cloran tells me, “the artistic director of Bard on the Beach said to me: ‘Hypothetically, if we could get the rights to the Beatles music, how could we pair that with Shakespeare?’ So we looked at As You Like it. Then, incredibly, Bard on the Beach did get the rights for that production, and off we went.”

Cloran set the play in the 1960s, not only because it was The Beatles’ era but because the main characters flee corrupt society to get back to nature in the Forest of Arden, where a kind of counterculture can live and breathe.

Asking Questions

“It fits the trajectory of the Beatles’ songs,” Cloran says, “and how their writing started in a very naïve place, like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and near the end got much more complicated and spiritual and philosophical. And in our play, a lot of the characters start in a place that’s very naïve, then run into the forest and get involved in much more philosophical questions.”

Cloran is the artistic director of the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Canada, one of the country’s largest regional theatres. Like the Rep, it produces a wide breadth of programming. Under Cloran’s leadership, it’s also gaining a reputation as a home for pre-Broadway tryouts of musicals such as Hadestown and Six.

Cloran began his professional career in Toronto. “I ran a little company that did a lot of devised work and international collaborations, where I would take a group of Canadian actors to Bosnia or South Africa to work with artists from those countries and build collaborative works that we toured and then brought back to Canada. I haven’t done a show like that from scratch in quite a while, but most of the plays I direct are new plays that we’re building together.”

Diversity in Casting

His second staging of As You Like It nearly finished its Citadel Theatre run in early 2020 before the pandemic shutdown. Since then, it’s been safely produced in Winnipeg and at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Several actors from the Chicago production are among the Rep’s 16-member cast, a group that Corlan calls fantastic.

For him, as for the Rep, diversity in casting has long been a priority. “This play has lots of room to make sure that everyone feels welcome,” he says.

It also asks a lot from the actors, who must do far more than make Shakespeare’s language clear and natural. They must be great musicians. Some must be great wrestlers, too.  Since Shakespeare included a wrestler character and the 1960s also marked the start of professional wrestling, Corlan opens his show with a full-scale wrestling spectacle emceed by Touchstone the jester.

“It’s a joyous night at the theatre” Corlan summarizes. “It’s so much fun and so much about love in its many forms. I feel like if it sends people into the night with a song in their heart and a belief in our shared humanity, we’ve done our job.”

“As You Like It” runs Feb. 15-March 20 at the Rep’s Quadracci Powerhouse, 108 E. Wells St.  Visit milwaukeerep.com for times, tickets and safety protocols.