Sisterhood of the traveling pants: Kim Pompo, Lauren Pisano and

Mike Kulha in Le Moyne College’s As You Like It.

Shakes It Up

Cell phones and beer bottles are some new wrinkles added to Le Moyne College's mounting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It

There’s only one test for a college production of a Shakespearean comedy. It’s not just deportment, such as having a beautiful young actress cross-dress and walk like a guy. Nor is it the articulate delivery of all those crackling good lines like “All the world’s a stage,” “And thereby hangs a tale” or “Can one desire too much of a good thing?” Here’s what you really want to know: Can these old bones get up and dance? Will the show make you laugh?

For As You Like It, the fall production from Le Moyne College’s Boot and Buskin Theater Group at the Coyne Center for the Performing Arts, everything before the intermission has an amusing quality that feels like a WWE-style smackdown of a wrestling match. Yet the real hilarity begins to roll in the last hour. Not just titters, but from-the-gut roaring guffaws. Yes it does.

Like all Shakespearean farces, As You Like It is not what you’d call plot-driven, although the full story is more complicated than we can relate here. The backdrop is a political dispute between two powerful noblemen: Duke Frederick (Jake Miguel), who has muscled in on his older brother, and the deposed Duke Senior (Mike Blagys), who lives in bucolic exile in the Forest of Arden. In this modern-dress production, where some soliloquies are delivered on cell phones, Duke Frederick is a blue-suited heavy. He’s just the man to foreclose your grandmother and give himself a $100 million bonus. The banished duke, meanwhile, has given up the rat race for blissed-out frolicking in the countryside.

As the action flows on, we begin to forget politics and pay more attention to several pairs of lovers. The most important straddle the political divide, the first of a series of hurdles they must overcome. Tall, glamorous Rosalind (Lauren Pisano), daughter to Duke Senior, becomes smitten with handsome Orlando (Patrick McHugh) when he defeats a larger rival, Charles (Andrew Derminio), who is literally as ferocious as a lion. (Meggan Camp’s lion costume knocks the audience dead, even though the wearer loses.) Orlando likes Rosalind, too, but doesn’t get a chance with her before the bullying Duke Frederick exiles Rosalind and her lovely pal Celia (Kim Pompo). The girls don’t want to be recognized and so they take disguises. Rosalind will don pants and go as the boy Ganymede, while Celia reappears as Ganymede’s girlfriend Aliena, given to valley girl talk. And they head for the Forest of Arden, with Orlando in pursuit, not able to recognize them in disguise.

Audiences, who still crave doublets and ruffs, tend to be suspicious of modern-dress productions of Shakespeare, accusing them of gimmickry. Director Steve Braddock, costume designer Camp and scenic/lighting designer Karel Blakeley have more on their minds than mere cleverness. They have rethought the play in light of all we have experienced with technology and the often ambivalent rewards of getting out on the land. In their hands, the contemporary world is coldly competitive, one of the reasons there are relatively few laughs in the first half-hour. The scene is dominated by two frigid, high modernist walls, braced with steel. The Duke’s haughty enforcer, Le Beau (Alisha Espinoza), and her shades-wearing thugs present palpable threats. It’s a good place to flee from.

Then Blakeley’s two walls part to reveal the contemporary Forest of Arden, which is Northern Exposure verging on Tupper Lake. Think mosquitoes and flannel-shirted yokels. All the denizens drink beer from long-necked bottles. Such innovations may initially look like an undercutting of the pastoral in this romance, but they also switch the mood to comedy and romance. And, paradoxically, they allow for a note of clear-eyed realism.

In Arden all the comic characters are given freedom to romp. Touchstone (Terry LeCasse), the sarcastic fool who fled with Rosalind and Celia, falls for a lusty country lass, Audrey (Jenna Crofoot). In a parody of the main love story, the shepherd Silvius (Alex Gherardi) pursues the not-so-reluctant shepherdess Phoebe (Fiona Barbour). Scholars speculate that these little roles were written to give full employment to all the players in Shakespeare’s company, but here director Braddock prudently assigns them to some of his top talent. LaCasse, who has picked up lots of new tricks at Le Moyne, has had abundant experience in community theater for nearly 10 years. Similarly, Gherardi stole the show in the Wit’s End Players’ recent production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and Barbour is one of the most experienced players from Le Moyne productions. This also goes for Carmen Viviano-Crafts, another veteran of Spelling Bee, as Hymen, goddess of marriage, who somehow looks a bit like Cher in 1969.

Good as the lines and the timing are, more than a few laughs come from a series of visual gags and anomalies. Touchstone, for example, sports plus fours from the 1920s; he’s also a dandy and a fussbudget with a germ obsession, as he constantly douses his hands with liquid cleaner. (Shades of Adrian Monk!) The exiled duke wanders around like one of the Seven Brothers looking for one of the Seven Brides.

Like a frog on a lily pad, the cynic Jaques (David Melchionne) also roams the Forest of Arden, forming under his derby. His “All’s the world’s a stage” speech, the most frequently quoted from the play, is delivered matter-of-factly, like a confidence shared from a traveler on the road. There’s hardly a speech in all of Shakespeare where we feel the author speaking directly to us, but in keeping with the contemporizing of the whole, there is never the weight of portentousness, only intimacy.

For all the fun in small roles, the heavy lifting still goes to the leads, each facing different tasks. Rosalind can be one of the best women’s roles in all of Shakespeare and was notably favored by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave and Dame Maggie Smith. Lauren Pisano’s interpretation is well-grounded in the text, a young woman about the age of a college student whose emotions register fully on her face. With Orlando the danger is always that he will be seen only as moonstruck. With Patrick McHugh as Orlando, he’s the buff victor of the wrestling match with Charles and an alpha male on a mission.

As has long been the tradition with Boot and Buskin productions, all members of the large cast reflect the close attention of the director, even when their names can’t make it to the reviewer’s tally. One meriting her own applause is Lauren Slawson in the otherwise unrewarding role of Adam, the aged servant of Orlando’s bullying brother Oliver (Mike Kulha). Donning a prosthetic nose, Slawson’s Adam drags along with a convincing arthritic walk.

Completing the renewal of As You Like It are the original compositions of Elizabeth Luttinger, a music faculty member at Syracuse University, who also appeared in Spelling Bee. Luttinger employs several musical styles but wows the audience by restaging the best-known lyrics, “A Lover and His Lass,” and all its “Hey, Nonny-Nonnies,” in a rap beat.

The Bard lives. It feels so good when you laugh. 

This production runs through Saturday, Nov. 7. See Times Table for information.