Florida State University is known for its high quality theatrical productions. I, a professional theatre critic for the London Times, discovered this production to be filled with amazing undergraduate students displaying their acting skills in a healthy learning environment. Every season, the FSU School of Theatre usually picks a Shakespearean production to keep its teachings didactic and literary. This year’s selections proved successful in keeping Florida State on the map as one of the leading college-level Shakespearean-stage-producing schools in the southeast. Even though the school did their best in presenting classic theatre, they were unsuccessful in using new viewpoints to update old scripts. In their most recent production of Twelfth…show more content… However, since its introduction into Shakespeare’s folio in 1623, various literary analysts have discovered its content to be hollow, “tedious” and “frigid artificiality”. This comes across in FSU’s production through its various cuts and rearrangements of the original text. The director, Michael Hayden decided to adapt the show to fit into a traditional two-act play format. Originally seeming successful, I soon realized the show went on for far too long, even with the cuts. I believe the main downfall was its repetitive back-to-back scenes involving the same characters discussing the same things. The focal storyline involving Viola, Olivia, Duke Orsino and Sebastian was outshined by the other characters, mainly because of their imbalanced amount of stage time and tone in acting style. Most of the line delivery of the “main characters” seemed to have a modern, serious vocal pattern to them. For example, Olivia’s line “What is your parentage?” came off in a matter of frazzled interpretation through her use of self-discovery and inner-thoughts. However, John Russel Brown, a Shakespearean scholar, interprets the text begging to be directed as “over-exaggerated” to highlight the blank text. The imbalanced stage time gave most of the content of the show to generally “minor characters”, such as Feste, Toby, Malvolio and Maria. Their delivery was true to what Brown called Twelfth Night’s text as straightforward and lack of critical thought . They performed their lines with a sense of whimsical fantasy and a truly fun perspective on a show that lacks any major critical thoughts or interpretation. Thad Jenkins Logan actually describes the play as “a world given over to pleasure, intoxication, and freedom”. I would interpret this as him finding the work to be a piece of art meant purely for entertainment purposes. The presentation of the “main characters” and “minor characters” giving
