Celebrating its fifth season, Public Works is the Public’s local and national initiative that invites diverse communities from across New York to join in creating ambitious works of participatory theater.

This year, Public Works presents Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in a ravishing new musical adaptation by Director of Public Works Laurie Woolery and Shaina Taub, featuring music and lyrics by Taub, the acclaimed singer/songwriter behind last season’s “free-spirited, thoroughly delightful” (The New York Times) adaption of Twelfth Night, and choreography by Emmy nominee Sonya Tayeh (Hundred Days, Kung Fu).

Two hundred community members and professional actors perform together on the Delacorte stage in this immersive dream-like tale of faithful friends, feuding families and lovers in disguise. Forced from their homes, Orlando, Duke Senior, his daughter Rosalind and niece Celia, escape to the Forest of Arden, a fantastical place of transformation, where all are welcomed and embraced. Lost amidst the trees, the refugees find community and acceptance under the stars. Fall under love’s spell in this magical story of chance encounters and self-discovery.

At the top of Act II of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, when the audience first glimpses the Forest of Arden, the banished Duke Senior (who is hiding out there) pronounces life in the wood to be “exempt from public haunt.” That’s certainly not the case in Public Works’ new musical adaptation (by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery). I can’t imagine there’s ever been an Arden as teeming with human life as the one depicted at the Public Theater’s Delacorte Theater in Central Park. A cast of some 200 performers crowds the boards, wearing colorful fabrics cut in a variety of 2017 styles. It’s as though the sylvan glades had been overrun by attendees of some pop-music festival—a latter-day Woodstock, where everyone looks as crisp, bright, and stylish as players in a Vincente Minnelli film musical. The big trees in David Rockwell’s charming set soon blaze with festive electric lights and lanterns. It’s about as rural and rustic as a Park Slope block party. As described in the program, the idea behind the production (which Woolery directed), was to present the play in “pageant form”—following a tradition that extends back to Medieval passion plays, which relied on the skills of various s …Read more