I have to confess that although it has many virtues most notably poetic effusions and almost constant verbal wit I've never liked Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. The heroine, Helena, is an unlikely combination of Patient Griselda, Florence Nightingale, and Cinderella, who chases after a younger, more noble, better looking, young lord, cures an incurable king, is awarded the hand of any male she desires, manipulates the young man into a marriage that he then flees from, and goes through even more unbelievable maneuvers to bed him and get pregnant by him and actually win him over because the final curtain is coming apace. Not only is it another one of Shakespeare's "You mean she's not dead?" plots, but most of the characters are willful and fairly annoying or exhibitionist clowns.
Still, there is all that poetry and wit, so there are opportunities for minor acting triumphs and some funny carrying-on. This really impressively cast production promises all those virtues, but it's better behaved and duller than most All's Well That Ends Wells. I suppose that we have to blame director Marti Maraden. A great actress and an accomplished director, her well-known taste and refinement as an artist may be her undoing here. The loud, bawdy clown roles most notably the outrageously intrusive punner Lavache who responds to his employer, the Countess of Rossillion, solely to attempt to amuse her, and the sourly sarcastic old lord Lafew are cleverly performed by Tom Rooney and Stephen Ouimette, respectively, but in such understated form that they seem to have been warned against trying to get laughs in the comedy.
Only the enormously commanding Juan Chioran broadly struts his comic stuff, playing the boastful coward Parolles. His comeuppance is therefore almost touching because, like the rest of Maraden's direction, it is less playful and more seriously treated than usually.
Somewhat similarly, Jeff Lillico, a strikingly likable young actor, plays Bertram, the young Count of Rossillion, so charmingly before Helena gets the king to give him to her as husband, she seems more grasping and overreaching than usual, and he seems less the spoiled rake who is eventually reformed and more the abused ingenue. Bertram's mistreatment of young virgins thereafter looks almost like bitter payback.
I was pleased to see (and hear) Brian Dennehy playing the King of France in beautiful classical style. And the effortlessly powerful actress Martha Henry seemed to be deliberately holding back in order to support her ensemble with affection: kindly encouraging Helena, gently reproving Bertram, chuckling and putting up with Lavache, and offering the King her loyalty. But stately and admirable seldom evoke laughter, and sometimes don't even provoke interest.
