‘Shakespeare’s Will,’ ‘Les Miz,’ and ‘Les Miz’

Magic begins to happen when Kristin Wold sweeps into Shakespeare & Company’s intimate Bernstein Theatre, removes her widow’s headdress and veil, tosses her long blonde hair and starts to declaim the blank verse cadences of Vern Thiessen’s “Shakespeare’s Will.” For the prize-winning Canadian playwright has imagined Anne Hathaway, William Shakespeare’s wife for 34 years, on the day of his funeral in Stratford-upon-Avon. And imagined is right, since so little is known about Hathaway: She was 26 and pregnant when she married the 18-year-old Shakespeare, a school tutor; she bore a girl and two years later twins, a boy and a girl. Shakespeare left for London soon after; Anne remained in Stratford all her life; her husband finally came home three years before he died. In his will, he famously left her only “my second-best bed along with the furniture.” Historians may have debated for decades over the nature of the Shakespeares’ relationship and the will’s meaning, but Thiessen isn’t interested. He has admitted to playing “fast and loose” with facts (the crucial tragedy in the play is fictitious) and with the will, to imagining a relationship “open” on both sides — Hathaway takes lovers in steamy one-night stands, Shakespeare is said to dally with boys in London – and to giving Hathaway a feminist bent that is so strident it seems anachronistic. Essentially the play is a work of style, of words strung together in dramatic sentences with poetic sounds: sea, sunshine, shore, sand, surf. (The play opens and closes with Hathaway’s yearning to escape to the sea.) Images, symbols and similes are repeated; songs — some charming, one lugubrious and haunting — are inserted like scene and mood shifters. In her superbly controlled yet seemingly spontaneous performance, Wold is simply wonderful. Wold, long associated with Shakespeare & Company and a theater professor at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, moves, speaks and sings with confident grace. Director Daniela Varon, the production and Wold are so good they make you think, for 70 minutes at least, “Shakespeare’s Will” is an important play. — Leon Graham “Shakespeare’s Will” plays at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, through August 24. For information and tickets, call 413-637-3353 or go to www.shakespeare.org. Based on Victor Hugo’s novel about crime, punishment, injustice, redemption, resolve, requited love, unrequited love and French students giving up their lives in the Paris uprising of 1832 (not the French Revolution of 1789), “Les Misérables” has captivated many millions of theatergoers since its premiére in Paris in 1980. It is a beloved piece of drama, and The Two of Us Productions is giving it a very handsome airing in the auditorium of the Taconic Central School District in Craryville, NY, a beautiful spot for theater. The full orchestra of experienced players back up this “sung-through” musical (it’s really an opera, but no one calls it that), which is, at times, thrillingly staged by director and conductor Stephen Sanborn. Large groups of people move about swiftly and sometimes unexpectedly, and some of the moves are inspired, as when Javert, the police inspector, throws himself from a bridge into the Seine. The bridge sails into the flies overhead leaving a silhouetted figure seeming to fall through space. Very nice. The cast is a mix of professional and amateur actors, most very stagewise and all very well rehearsed. The costumes are gorgeous, unless they are rags, of course, and everyone on that stage is absolutely sold on what they are about. The sound, however, is a problem. Micing works with some voices better than others. But that could be solved by next weekend. Who knows? This is a canny, smart and imaginative production, and it’s good to see private donations and public funding through the Columbia County Council on the Arts putting people of all ages on a stage with expert, even inspired direction. That’s good for audiences, too, who, as audiences always seem to, just loved this “Les Miz.” —Marsden Epworth “Les Misérables” runs at the Performing Arts Center at the Taconic Central School District in Craryville, NY, through June 15. For tickets and information, call 518-758-1648 or go to thetwoofusproductions.org. And for yet another production of “Les Misérables,” The Sharon Playhouse in Sharon, CT, is staging this musical with professional actors, theater students and experienced amateurs, running June 18 - 29. For tickets, call 860-364-7469 or go to www.triarts.net.