Jacob Ming-Trent Leads Delightful ‘Merry Wives’ In Central Park Celebration – Review

opens tonight as a most welcome – and, with vaccines required, as safe as can be – escape from the woes of the world. With an update to a contemporary South Harlem peopled with a splendid assemblage of West African immigrant characters,enhances the classic farce with up-to-the-minute references , the occasional brief snippet of R&B crooning, and a same-sex romance that seems completely at home in the setting.

The bones of Shakespeare’s play remain, if fleshed out a bit with more than a little contemporary explicitness: The self-satisfied buffoon Falstaff sends identical “love” letters to two married women – Armand’s Madam Page and Watson’s Madam Ford – prompting these merry wives to plot an elaborate, farcical revenge that repeatedly sets Falstaff up to be humiliated or worse. Helping carry out the plan is good-hearted Mama Quickly , a schemer to rival even the devious Falstaff.

There’s also a jealous husband , a trusting husband , a fearful preacher at odds with a blustering doctor , and a neighborhood elder who wants to marry off his timid nephew to the daughter of one of the merry wives. Alas, for the nephew anyway, that daughter, Anne Page, has eyes only for the earnest and equally smitten young Fenton, here played by MaYaa Boateng and giving the production a same-sex twist that works beautifully. The opposition of Anne’s father to her relationship with Fenton takes on added reverberations.

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