John Sipes, who directed the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's sumptuous new "Henry VIII," says that the play brings to mind pageantry and the fall of various personages. Well, the OSF's new production of the play, which had a soggy opening Friday night in the rain at the OSF's outdoor, Elizabethan Stage, has a lot of pageantry interrupted here and there by the fall of various personages.
Fortunately, those personages are strongly portrayed by OSF veterans. Buckingham, the nobleman who runs afoul of the nefarious Cardinal Wolsey, is brought to seething life by Michael Elich. Anthony Heald's Wolsey, as the Machiavel who runs England, is the kind of smarmy villain we love to hate.
Henry's dumped, devoted wife, Katherine, gets a powerful interpretation from Vilma Silva, who plays her with a Spanish accent, reminding us that Katherine of Aragon was in fact a stranger in a strange land. Her steely self-control wavers only when, eyes flashing, she bridles at her enemy, the reptilian Wolsey, while trying to defend herself to a court in which the verdict is a foregone conclusion.
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