Saturday night, however, with the lighting repaired and the lightning holding off, the show finally went on. And on - this is not a quick hit, with a running time closing in on three hours, but for the most part it's an enthralling, effective blend of comedy, romance, and poetic rumination.
Steven Maler, founding artistic director of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (which produced the free Boston Common shows until Citi took over), keeps his large cast rambling smoothly through the woods - which, in Scott Bradley's simple design, are just flat, painted panels that slide around to create different groves of trees. Emily Pepper's stylish costumes and a few other scenic touches, notably some fascistic-looking banners for the evil Duke Frederick's oppressive court, nod nicely to the '30s without screaming about it.
That tone of bittersweet sophistication is enhanced by J Hagenbuckle and Peter McMurray's jazzy-gypsy songs and Martha Mason's lively dances, which have the exiled nobles surrounding Duke Senior in the forest with a continual festival of rustic but elegant entertainment. Picture Django Reinhardt setting up a cafe in the woods, and you've just about got it.
These scenes with the exiles are among the production's finest. Tom Gleadow lends a burly physical presence and a sweet voice to the lead singer, Amiens, and Johnny Lee Davenport has a quiet grandeur as the Duke.
But there are two overriding reasons to see this production, and their names are Fred Sullivan Jr. and Larry Coen. Coen's physical brilliance as the courtly clown Touchstone is a nonstop marvel of precisely detailed gesture and vocal variety; his delivery of Touchstone's hilarious demonstration of the seven varieties of formal insult provides a semester's worth of instruction in the fine points of physical and verbal comic performance. Try to stop laughing long enough to notice how carefully and delicately he creates each effect.
