Shakespeare & Company fields a cast led by some of its stalwarts, not all of whom seem right for their roles, but they treat the material with the requisite light touch, missing neither its humanity nor its comedy. The baby-voiced Prusha’s Lotty, thundering about in old-fashioned bathing costume as she attempts to rouse her companions, is a shy matron out of whom a girl is popping. Tod Randolph’s Rose is at first a woman almost startled by her unhappiness; decked out in white under the Italian sun, she gradually, wonderingly, discards her prudishness. Elizabeth Ingram’s Mrs. Graves is less of a dragon than the one Joan Plowright played in the film (there’s more Maggie Smith about her), but her timing is as formidable as she is. And Corinna May, her sylphlike form draped by designer Govane Lohbauer in a series of diaphanous outfits of the era, is a pitch-perfect Lady Caroline, flaunting her beauty even as she shrugs off her looks. Malcolm Ingram’s Mellersh is less overbearing than just unimaginative, and Dave Demke’s dapper Frederick receives his wife’s transition from “disappointed madonna” to loose-tressed vixen with a dazed but deeply satisfied grace.
SAMURAI 7.0: A droll if also earnest comment on itself.
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Beau Jest Moving Theater’s Samurai 7.0: Under Construction (at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through June 24) has also been to the movies. The inspiration for the 75-minute theater piece is the epic 1954 Akira Kurosawa film Seven Samurai, which it more or less duplicates with eight actors, bamboo props from Pier One, and projected supertitles. As director Davis Robinson points out in a program note, the film’s story — in which the inhabitants of a farming village in feudal Japan hire unemployed samurai to defend their town against marauding bandits — is simple. But Beau Jest is out less to tell that tale than to prove it can, using ingenious low-tech methods that have been all but trampled in this Phantom-of-the-Opera-meets-multimedia age. Hence the show is a droll if also earnest comment on itself.Founded in 1984 by then Emerson College theater professor Robinson, the troupe (best known for the Elliot Norton Award–winning Krazy Kat) has been dormant for seven years, Robinson having moved on to Bowdoin College in Maine. Afforded a sabbatical, he proves himself the theater-making junkie he is with this clever comeback, which is fun to watch but not easy to fathom the point of. It seems less an homage to Kurosawa than to roughhewn theater, randomly referring to Shakespeare, in particular the Chorus of Henry V and the “rude mechanicals” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream preparing “Pyramus and Thisbe” for the Duke. But Beau Jest is no bunch of amateur rubes whose crude efforts exist to be made fun of by royalty. Its use of little is witty and graceful, if hardly adequate to replicate action filmmaking of the 1950s — though the brevity of Samurai 7.0 does stand as a gentle suggestion that, even with all those galloping bandits and thwacking battles in the rain, Kurosawa’s film didn’t need to be three and a half hours long.
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