Hi, I'm Kevin Rich I'm the director of applied Shakespeare here at the University of Colorado Boulder and I'd like to introduce you to Tim Orr producing artistic director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival team and who is also directing Twelfth Night this summer. Tim can you talk a little bit about how long you've been in this role and tell us a little bit about CSF. Sure, yeah, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is a professional theater company in residence here at the University of Colorado Boulder. We are the second oldest Shakespeare Festival in America, we are now heading into our 62nd season and we have produced every play in Shakespeare's canon twice in our 62 years. So that's a lot of work and a lot of those titles we've produced nine or 10 times, we don't just produce Shakespeare, we produce non-Shakespeare plays as well but it's a professional company with actors, directors, and designers from all over the world who come to us. Excellent. So why Twelfth Night? Why Twelfth Night? How much time do we have? That is a big question. Well, I love the play, I think it's my favorite, I think it's my favorites of Shakespeare's comedies and it might be my favorite of his plays. We had not produced Twelfth Night in about seven years it's an extremely popular title, it works so well in a big out, so we have two theaters. We have a big outdoor amphitheater, the Mary rip on amphitheater and it seats a 1000 people and then we have an indoor stage as well, which seats 400 and it's a more of your traditional, what you think of as a theater with a balcony and state proscenium stage. But Twelfth Night works so well in either venue, it works well in any venue, but it works really well in a big amphitheater type space where you've got this beautiful language and a high-stakes for the characters and great comedy, music and pathos and all of it. So I loved the play I have really fond memories of it from past times that I've directed it and then as an actor. Excellent. What's your overall vision for this particular production this summer? For this particular production of Twelfth Night, I was really inspired by the shipwreck, by the sky and the ocean, the sea and because I knew we were producing it in our outdoor venue, the sky goes like this, right over the whole theater and it starts in daylight and as the sun sets, the theater naturally irises down to the stage with the darkness and it's something that I just kept coming back to it I love the way, so first of all in my production, I've swapped the first two scenes in the play that you read, the first scene is Orsino and he's had that famous speech of music be the food of love, play on yada, yada and then the second scene is the shipwreck in the storm and vial of being washed up onto the beach with the sea captain and she says "What country friends is this?" I think that's a terrible way to start. So we're going to start with the shipwreck and it's not my idea a lot of directors do this, they swap those first two scenes. I think I would believe it was a printer's error when they put the folio together that put that Orsino scene first and the shipwreck second. Shakespeare was an actor and businessman, you would absolutely start a play with a storm and a shipwreck and nobody knows who Orsino is yet, even when he starts speaking if music be the food of love, we don't know his name or who he is, they talk about him in the shipwreck scene so that's another reason for moving them around. What was the question? What your overall vision was. Yeah, so it's that and when I start thinking about the ocean and the sea it is a town or a community that lives right there on the beach. So Orsino's house and Olivia's house are on the stage and write off their back porch, right off the back steps of their home if the rest of the stage is the beach and the audience is the ocean and we can treat the audience as the ocean and we can further that sense of play. In make believe that the audience is the ocean. Like Viola in the ship wreck will be born out of the sea and born from the sea and born by the sea, and coming from the audience, and then throughout the rest of the plays, we will find more ways of utilizing the audience as the ocean, and creating that sense of play and fun. Like remember when you played, "Oh, hot lava." You can't go out there. You can't touch that because it's the ocean. I think there'll be plenty of opportunities for fun there. At the end, Viola and Orsino can sail away up the aisle. Good. That's the vision for it. It'll also have this, like a child's story book. We're reading a lot of kids books at home right now. That sense of Wimsey and play and imagination that comes out of those books fits right in with Twelfth Night as well. I think that was where the idea came from. A lot of you have talked about music too. I know that you have a background in music and music factors into this play a lot, can you talk about how you're using music in this production? Yeah. So the character of Feste. Is that he's a musician and he's asked and paid to sing a song every now and then. The big songs that he has are, Oh, mistress mine, Come away, death, and The wind and the rain at the end. He's got a couple other little snippets or catches of things that he sings in between, and that was really important to me. I've written music for productions of Twelfth Night in the past and loved it. Had a wonderful time. It does two things. It elevates the production. I mean, it can create real fun and energy onstage with live music and everybody singing and dancing. But then some of those numbers like "Come away death," can bring it down to the smallest point of silence and stillness as well. So it really adds contours to the production. So I hired an actor who is a composer as well to play Feste. He's writing all original music for it, for him to perform in the role of Feste as well. That's exciting. Now, what about this play in the context of other comedies? I can understand from a commercial point of view, comedies sell. But in this chronology of Shakespeare's plays, this is one of the later comedies. It's darker. There is a sense of Wimsey and fun, but there's also cruelty and violence and melancholy in the production. Can you talk about that? Yeah, sure. Again, I want to say this is my opinion only and other Shakespearean professionals and scholars might disagree. But I think the early ones are super funny and slap sticky, but there are a lot of fluff. There's not a whole lot of meat on the bone in comedy of errors, but it's great fun. Midsummer Night's Dream, they get better, and taming of the Shrew is a great play, but they start to really achieve, I think, with as you like it, and Twelfth Night are outstanding because they have everything. There's real story and character to explore. There's great comedy and great slapstick as well, music, and they really make us think and talk and discuss love, how we fall into love, how we fall out of love, the nature of it all, and then they start to get, I think he starts to go more dark with measure for measure, and these other plays that we consider in the comedy category. So I think Twelfth Night is right in that sweet spot of being a wonderful play for the audience and a wonderful exercise for artists. Excellent. So let's drill down on some specific design choices. Can you talk a little bit about what we're going to see this summer and how you're imagining the physical world of the play? Yeah. I have learned that if you're not overly prescribing and detailed in micro managing the designers with your clear vision. If you're not overdoing that and give them plenty of blank canvas to work with, then you wind up with something much more interesting and much more creative because I'm not a set designer. What I said to the designers, and this was almost a year ago, when we first started on this production was, here are the things that I need, and here are the things that I'm not interested in and I would love to collaborate with you all. I know that the idea of the beach, of it running down to the beach and the ocean, I'm not super obsessed with a specific time period, like this is taking place in 1725 in Cuba or something. I know that this is a world where people are still carrying swords and they're carrying muskets. Yes. I want them to look great and trim in costumes. But it is not a super conservative world either, this is a world where they're comfortable taking their clothes off. So it's not high Edwardian collars and cuffs and skirts down to the floor or anything like that either. It's a warm, comfortable world, but it's a children's book world as well. It's partly pirates, and we know it's grounded in reality, and it happened a long time ago. Right. It's turning out to look a little bit like Pirates of the Caribbean. Nice. I think that's what it might be. In the way that Shakespeare started play fast and loose with it. Totally. You're not setting in in a really specific time. There's no statement I want to make about a particular time period or look through a lens of history, not for this production. I want this to be a storybook. I want it to unfold like a story. Specifically, I want younger audience members to lean in and beyond the edge of their seats and really connect with it as well. We came up with this, it's a wonderfully wild world that they have created where it feels semi-Mediterranean, hopefully we have images to show you. It's blue, the world is blue and gray or seen on Olivia's house, actual houses are mashed together. Yeah. There's a peer and there's a boat on the stage and sand. Cool. That is the world that they're living in. Toby is ex-military. We can tell by his costume that he had some military background, and it comes out in a lot of his language as well. Feste has traveled. We know that from his costume. That he's not necessarily restrict, he's from another place, and he has been around the world. Viola, as we know, is from another country and so is her brother Sebastian, and so is Antonia, that they have come from someplace else. Antonia is, in my world, is a professional mercenary, and comes into this world deeply in love with Sebastian. These character clues that are in the text are what will help us and help the actors create their character, create their Malvolio, their Toby, their Antonia, their Viola. Excellent.
