Asolo Raises the New Stages Bar with Twelfth Night

SARASOTA – For the last five years, students from the FSU Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training has been touring Florida schools in a joint production with the Asolo Rep that has successfully engaged students through condensed versions of Shakespeare, adapted to a more modern, adolescent-oriented setting. Their sixth endeavor, the popular Shakespearean comedy Twelfth Night, takes the concept to a whole new level that has the potential to change how young people who see it approach theater.

With each generation, the challenge of presenting Shakespeare to young audiences surely grows. The language becomes even more antiquated, the customs further removed from popular culture. New York City-based director Jen Wineman, who led a well-received adaptation of As You Like it in last year's New Stages tour, returns to adapt and direct Twelfth Night and did an even more remarkable job of making the historic work accessible to today's middle and high school audiences, while still paying worthy homage to a literary masterpiece.

To get on more familiar ground, Wineman turns the setting into a modern-day summer camp. While she keeps the text very much intact, updated music again serves as a bridge between the far off times. While this surely makes it easier for young audiences to relate, it was the universal language of side-splitting comedy that Wineman and her cast best used to transport the work of the world's most famous bard into the new millennium.

The cast is composed of the Conservatory's entire third-year class, who get the opportunity to show off their comedic skills at full volume. Ally Farzetta, who we've mostly seen in more reserved and stoic roles, is laugh-out-loud hilarious as Feste, court jester of Countess Olivia (Lisa Egan Woods). Farzetta's frisky energy and well-honed physical comedy suggest a very well-rounded young actress who has already proven herself quite adept in dramatic leads.

Tom Harney is roaringly hilarious as Malvolio, Olivia's lovestruck butler, providing perhaps the most memorable moment of the play when he busts into a raucous, lederhosen-clad song and dance serenade, using The Weeknd's I Can't Feel My Face, though Josh James, who rivals Harney in hilarity as the hapless riding instructor Sir Andrew Aguecheek, gives him a good run for the money while lip syncing Silento's Watch Me, complete with riding-crop led gyrations.

Chris Alexey Diaz, the conservatory's stand out star of last season and an integral part of A Midsummer Night's Dream's success, once again demonstrates his broad range and stage maturity as Antonio. Even in a relatively small part, it's very difficult for his immense dramatic presence not to dominate each scene he enters. Kelsey Petersen, who has also made a reputation as a standout performer over the last three years at the Conservatory, again provides the dramatic anchor as Olivia.

The cast will take a stripped down, relatively set-less version of the production on the road for the next two months performing for middle and high schools throughout the state. Locally, Manatee High, Out of Door Academy, the SCF Collegiate School, Lee Middle, Lakewood Ranch High, Nolan Middle and the Manatee School for the Arts will host productions.

There will also be special open-to-the-public productions at the Fogartyville Community Media and Arts Center in Sarasota (11/12), the South Florida Museum (11/13), followed by a Shakespeare Under the Stars Performance at the museum’s Bishop Planetarium (11/14). The production will then conclude with a special homecoming performance at Asolo's Cook Theatre on November 24. For more information visit the Asolo website.