“All are welcome here.”
That line, delivered by Darius de Haas’s banished duke in “As You Like It,” trimly encapsulates the ethos of the Public Works project, whose rollicking, poignant and flat-out delightful production of Shakespeare’s comedy runs at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park through Tuesday night. This is the fifth annual Public Works show, and like its predecessors, it has recruited more than 200 amateur performers from the likes of the Children’s Aid Society and the Military Resilience Project to join a handful of industry ringers. If all the world’s a stage, the thinking apparently goes, we all might as well get together and put on a show.
Go and see this one. At about 100 minutes, it is a brief and generous respite from floods and nukes and violent demonstrations. You can recommence fretting and resisting when it’s over.
This musical adaptation, by the composer Shaina Taub (“Old Hats,” Public Works’ “Twelfth Night”) and the director Laurie Woolery, also the director of Public Works, rarely tackles politics head on. But with its varied cast and its lilting confidence in basic human decency, this “As You Like It” offers a utopian vision of a society that favors acceptance over division, honesty over obfuscation, grace over meanness. That is probably why Ms. Taub and Ms. Woolery subtly tweaked Duke Senior’s original line — “Be truly welcome hither” — into a motto that can be read as embracing immigrants and exiles and anyone who wants to play a part in this American experiment.
Not that the theater felt so welcoming on Saturday night. The Public Theater, which created Public Works, has a policy of continuing its outdoor performances even in light rain. Half an hour past curtain time, the rain was arguably light — in that no actual cats or dogs were falling — and the performers began the show, sloshing gamely through the opening number, while the band played behind plastic sheeting. The audience members, many of whom had upcycled garbage bags as impromptu ponchos, were sloshing, too, but they stayed until Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, damply admitted defeat around 9 p.m.
“We are not in control of this,” he told the crowd, adding: “We would be more in control if we controlled our carbon emissions.”
Continue reading the main storyMr. Eustis was back the next night, having traded a sopping “Fun Home” hoodie for a rumpled suit, and warning that the cast’s pent-up excitement might cause the theater to levitate. With the laws of physics on notice, Ms. Taub appeared, dressed like a folksy stage manager in a sweater and patched overalls. She has cast herself as the melancholy Jaques, and in her funny, lovely, little-kid voice she sings:
“All the world’s a stage
And everybody’s in the show
Nobody’s a pro
All the world’s a stage
And every day we play our part
Acting out our heart”
That song introduces Orlando (the captivating Ato Blankson-Wood), the maltreated son of a dead nobleman, and Rosalind (Rebecca Naomi Jones), the browbeaten daughter of the banished Duke. Since Ms. Jones was having vocal difficulties and had been advised to rest, Ms. Taub sang her songs while she mouthed the words. The spirited Ms. Jones has an uncanny way with lip-syncing, so this worked pretty well.
When Rosalind and Orlando meet at a wrestling match (a Shakespearean curlicue performed with verve and occasional biting by members of the Bronx Wrestling Federation) they fall heedlessly in love. Separately forced to flee the court, they come to the Forest of Arden, but complications loom. Rosalind has disguised herself as a young man and Orlando’s romantic protestations of love have become, in Ms. Taub’s lyrics, plain weird: “My love for you is like a hamburger, rare but also well-done.”
The set has been repurposed from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which closed at the Delacorte a few weeks ago. The costumes, by Andrea Hood, look like leftovers from a down-home production of “Hair.” Ms. Taub and Ms. Woolery have preserved just enough lines form Shakespeare to segue from one song to the next.
The score mixes folk and pop with hints of R&B. One number, the boy band-ish “Will U Be My Bride,” lets Mr. Blankson-Wood showcase his slim hips and radiant smile. Joel Perez, as the fool Touchstone, reprises that song when he woos the shepherd Andy (Troy Anthony). Andy is Audrey in the original, just like Silvia (Ariel Mapp) is usually Silvius. These queer romances suggest the Forest of Arden as a wholly inclusive space where all people are protected, a fairy tale vision of a sanctuary city.
But what makes “As You Like It” so thrilling is that when the cast is all assembled, it looks like New York City — busy, diverse, terrifically vital. There are tall performers and short ones, fat ones and thin ones, practiced dancers and a couple of little kids who shuffle from side to side half a beat behind. There are drummers from the Harambee Dance Company, belters from the Sing Harlem Choir, leapers from the Freedom Dabka Group. For the optimistic, they are reminders that theater, like democracy, is a collaborative form and that when all those disparate voices come together, the effect can be extraordinary.
On Sunday night, after the play’s quadruple wedding and a lengthy standing ovation, the crowd surged out of the theater, faces aglow. Some of those faces fell as people checked their phones and read news alerts about the possible end to DACA, the program protecting hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Tens of thousands of them live in New York state.
Where’s a Forest of Arden when you need one?
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