Featured as part of the American High School Theatre Festival, St. Mary's Episcopal School from Memphis presents this supposedly musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night; we're promised 'live music and verse' in this 'madcap comedy'. Yet, as Feste says, nothing that is so is so: there's a brief smattering of faintly sung tunes - mostly, for some reason, Christian folk songs - but generally this is a straight performance of Twelfth Night, albeit with a couple of mildly amusing, self-referential interludes.
This production is strongest when its actors are not performing Twelfth Night. It opens with the cast explaining the tropes and language of Shakespeare and running through a brief synopsis of the play, which is also where the biggest laughs come in. This is well-intentioned, since it means that younger audiences should be able to follow without losing the intricacy and beauty of the Bard's writing. However, this section doesn't feel integrated into the rest of the play; it would have been more effective had the 'No Fear Shakespeare'-style explanatory notes run throughout the whole piece.
The production of Twelfth Night itself is passable. There are some nice touches: Malvolio's tormentors sitting amongst the audience during the box tree scene implicates the spectator in an interesting way, plus the frantic changeovers as the cast of seven young women switch between characters leads to a bit of farcical fun. The young actors are clearly enjoying themselves and a couple of them have reasonable comic timing. As ever, Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch are the most enjoyable to watch,and Olivia Bernabe pulls off a wonderfully pompous Malvolio, whose cross-gartering scene is matched only by Bernabe's later cameo as an appropriately Scottish police officer.
It's all thrown together in a fairly slapdash way with minimal costume and set, which may add to the playfulness but generally there's not enough of a twist on Twelfth Night to warrant the title or make it particularly memorable. While it’s heartening to see young theatre enthusiasts having fun with a classic text, this rather uninspired production is frankly unlikely to impress a paying Fringe audience.
