Love’s Labours Lost
FreeWill Shakespeare Festival
John Richardson, Behind the Hedge:
“Love’s Labour’s Lost flirts at the beginning with being a new Beatles film with the four mop-top lads from Navarre, but it is the women who dominate. In this case the eight principals, the King of Navarre (Nathan Cuckow) and his three lords (Gervais, Cardinal, and Neil Kuefler) and the Princess of France (Kristi Hansen) and her three ladies (Thomas, Cornish, and Lambert), are of roughly equal socio-political station, but it is the women who steer the men, it is the women who control the men, and, in the end, it is the women who impose the final resolution on the men.”
Sheldon Elter with Troy O'Donnell, Ryan Parker,Robert Benz and Bill Brown
Caley Thomas, Mary Bernier, Kristi Hansen & Belinda Cornish
Sheldon Elter
Hunter Cardinal & Neil Kuefler
“Love’s Labour Lost‘ design and attitude is all the 60s of the Beatles, a bit of the Monkees, and a dash of Laugh-in.”
- Behind the Hedge
“Director Jim Guedo takes his playful al fresco version of Love's Labour's Lost back to the '60s. And in addition to the kooky attractions of the look (amusingly rendered by costume designer Megan Koshka), the contradictions of that era — lusty individualism enforced by conformist manifestos — mirror something of the paradoxes of this early Shakespeare comedy. Crammed with puns, jokes, double entendres that turn out to be triples (there are no singles), every kind of Elizabethan verse form and rhyme, it's a play of intricate verbal contortions that's all about mocking intricate verbal contortions. Guedo's entertaining sound design weaves every kind of '60s musical allusion into the evening.
It was Mother Nature, though, who gave the finale number its particular ripple of immediacy.
The play darkened just as the Edmonton sky finally lightened up.”
-The Edmonton Journal