![\""Twelfth](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/twelfth-scaled.jpg\" "\\"\"Twelfth")
<\/p>\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\u201cTwelfth Night\u201d at The Delacorte Theater (Photo: Joan Marcus)<\/p>\n
What if I told you, in a cast full of Oscar, Tony, and Emmy winners, it\u2019s Daphne Rubin-Vega who steals the show? I know what I\u2019d say if someone said it to me \u2013 of course she does. But still, it\u2019s surprising to see her slay so hard while delivering a pretty straightforward, text-faithful performance in a Shakespeare play. It\u2019s that fidelity to playing the truth of each moment and imbuing her secondary character, Maria, Olivia\u2019s maid, with such perspective and personality that hands this entire production of Twelfth Night over to her.<\/p>\n
The production is pretty well-cast all around. Lupita Nyong\u2019o and her brother Junior Nyong\u2019o are the shipwrecked twins and, aside from their height disparity, are nearly identical in Oana Botez\u2019s costumes and Krystal Balleza\u2019s hair design. Viola and Sebastian\u2019s eventual reunion at the end of the play is wrought with the kind of palpable, historied connection that only real-life siblings can bring.<\/p>\n
Sandra Oh and Khris Davis play the Countess Olivia and Duke Orsino, though Orsino is so sidelined in Saheem Ali\u2019s production that Davis isn\u2019t given the space to make much of an impression, other than displaying a stunning set of muscles. The connection between Orsino and Viola, in male dress as Cesario, is inherently homoerotic, but this production is so fervently \u201cno homo\u201d that nothing happens between them. That sidelines only Davis.<\/p>\n
Oh brings a giddy delight to Olivia as the play progresses. Even her despondent mourning in the beginning of the play has a kind of magnetic spark \u2013 it\u2019s clear why people are drawn to her. It\u2019s also clear that Oh is thrilled to be there. Her performance is grounded, but there is an unmistakable delight swirling around her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Maria\u2019s cohort, John Ellison Conlee (Sir Toby Belch), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Andrew Auguecheek), and Kapil Talwalkar (Fabian) have fun in a variety of outlandish, colorful costumes and in briefly diverting comedic situations. A scene played in a hot tub with a bong and lines of cocaine is the most fully realized of their bits, but Ali\u2019s production seems to favor this group over any other aspect of the play.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In general, the production tilts to the broad and ridiculous, shouting to the audience how accessible it\u2019s making the language, how fun Shakespeare can be. I admire the effort, but would have liked a touch more gravitas. If everything\u2019s a gas, where are the stakes?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even the tragedy of Twelfth Night \u2013 the treatment of Olivia\u2019s steward Malvolio \u2013 doesn\u2019t come to its full impact, despite casting Peter Dinklage and despite his wrenching out Malvolio\u2019s pain in the final scene. His appearance in \u201cyellow stockings and cross-gartered,\u201d which leads to his ultimate humiliation, is, in contrast to everything else onstage, underplayed. Dinklage appears not in stockings, but in some mustardy yellow boots, with brown laces that don\u2019t look entirely out of place with the rest of his costume. So what\u2019s the embarrassment?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Well, Dinklage engages in some impressive, if confusing, physical comedy while showing off those boots. But even as he tossed himself around the stage, legs akimbo, I felt uncomfortable with what was happening. If the joke is not that his stockings are hideous, then the joke is on his physical stature and that\u2019s not okay.<\/p>\n
The wide stage of the newly refurbished Delacorte Theater is filled only with tall letters spelling out the play\u2019s alternate title, What You Will. Otherwise, Maruti Evans\u2019 scenic design is just a series of platforms that rise through two traps at center stage. Ali\u2019s staging does not explore the space and results in repetitive scenes that feel longer than they are due to a lack of variety.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While leaving the theatre, someone next to me remarked that although the production is doing so much (the curtain call is an inexplicable drag ball that has nothing to do, visually or thematically, with the production), it was still boring. Real electricity can be tapped from just doing the play, from finding what is exciting about each moment in the text. Piling everything on top of it to make it \u201ceasy\u201d and \u201cfun\u201d only obscures what\u2019s great about the play in the first place.<\/p>\n
Luckily, Daphne Rubin-Vega gets it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cTwelfth Night\u201d at The Delacorte Theater (Photo: Joan Marcus) What if I told you, in a cast full…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":165657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-165656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}