Absolutely delightful. There is no other way to describe Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, which opened in the New Theatre last weekend.
Guest director Amanda Dehnert has taken this rather ambivalent romantic comedy and created a cheerful, charming fairy tale. Along the way, she also teaches some lessons about love, life and forgiveness. The production positively glows.
Christopher Acebo's scenic design is spare, blending the pastoral with the Victorian. Linda Roethke has designed a mixture of unlikely costumes ranging from the elegant to the absolutely hilarious.
Dehnert says she wanted to present All's Well That Ends Well as Life, about wants, about doing right and doing wrong, about making choices and committing to them. She picked a difficult canvas, to be sure, and perhaps her result is not quite what Shakespeare had in mind. But it is an immensely entertaining and satisfying one, nonetheless.
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