Review: Young Bros and Maidens Harmonize in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’

“Let’s rock!” is something I’m pretty sure no character in Shakespeare ever said. But on a sandy stage under a jaunty tent, with a green hillside as a welcoming backdrop, it seemed an apt way to begin “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”

It is, after all, a young man’s play, both in its authorship (Shakespeare was about 30) and story (four callow bros fall madly in love with four sharp maidens). And this production, directed by Amanda Dehnert for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, intensifies the youth-crush factor with 10 emo songs. Neither fully true to the strange original nor completely remade as a viable musical, it swings between those poles in ways that are both tiresome and charming.

Let’s start with the charming: The catchy songs, by Dehnert and the Chicago-based composer André Pluess, tap the sappy heart of summer and are danceable to boot. (You may be the audience member asked at one point to prove it.) Whether folky or funky, and despite lyrics that sound little like Shakespeare — “she’s a nice girl, always thinking twice girl” — they match the story emotionally, with titles like “The Infinite Ones” (as youth always sees itself) and “Change to Black” (as youth at some point must do).

That the songs don’t match the story structurally is probably an insuperable problem. “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” with or without the British “u,” is a very youthful, disjointed text, its thin thread of plot repeatedly cut by clowns, dullards, puns, pomposities and noodling that goes nowhere. Misdelivered letters and absurd disguises contribute. By the time you get to the masque near the end, featuring impenetrable spoofs of the nine classical “worthies,” you may doubt young Shakespeare’s judgment of worthiness.

And yet his ear for the painful paradoxes of love is already fully in evidence. The four young men of Navarre, who form a “Seinfeld”-like pact to abjure the company of women for three years, break it almost instantly when a delegation of four visiting gentlewomen arrives from France to resolve a diplomatic issue. (After many readings and viewings of the play, I still don’t know what that issue is.) In supple pentameter, Shakespeare explores the difference between the book learning the young men meant to engage in and the learning that emerges, despite their plans, from “the prompting eyes of beauty’s tutors.”

Still, theirs is a bumpy road to maturity. Spurred on by Berowne, “a man replete with mocks,” they double down on whimsy, dressing up for some reason as Russians to bamboozle their intendeds. (In Dehnert’s staging, the “Muscovites” are a rock group.) In response, the women, spurred on by Rosaline, whose eye “Jove’s lightning bears,” disguise themselves as one another to confuse and trump the men. But just as all of this gets sorted, with a quadruple marriage (or more) in sight, a last-minute death delays the nuptials and forestalls a normal resolution.

“Our wooing doth not end like an old play,” Berowne says. “Jack hath not Jill” — which if true enough to life, is way too sudden for dramaturgy.

The Hudson Valley Shakespeare production is not the first to struggle with such problems in musicalizing “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” But unlike the 1973 opera by Nicolas Nabokov, with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, or the musical comedy presented by the Public Theater in 2013, with songs by Michael Friedman, Dehnert’s version does not use its songs to deepen character and propel the story.

They are generally too short and atmospheric for that, most being sung between scenes instead of during them, and by members of the multitasking cast-slash-band (guitars, drums, accordion) who are observing the action, not experiencing it. The addition of songs, however beguiling, thus winds up emphasizing the play’s ungainliness by adding another unintegrated element and stretching the run time. A full-blown musical might have worked better, but at two hours and 40 minutes, it’s already too long for a summer romp.

That’s a shame, because some of the singers — including Melissa Mahoney, who plays the “wench” Jaquenetta, and Luis Quintero, one of the dullards — have great voices. Others compare favorably only with the chorus of mosquitoes that always accompanies a Hudson Valley Shakespeare outing. But if discipline is not the top vocal note, rawness verging on excessiveness is a kind of authenticity in a show about raw, excessive youth.

Authenticity is not sufficient when speaking the verse, though; it requires more finesse than some of the young actors yet possess. Getting your mouth around the overlapping and oddly shaped dialogue can be like eating an unpeeled pineapple.

Luckily, Stephen Michael Spencer as Berowne and Antoinette Robinson as Rosaline are standouts, fully inhabiting the process of growing up and growing wise. At first almost adversaries — he impulsive and she haughty — they gradually move toward the middle as the invented trials of infatuation give way to the real ones of love. Both are also generally spared the over-emphatic jollity that Dehnert has evidently encouraged as a way of plowing through difficult passages of dialogue and forcing the weird jokes to bloom. It’s no fun when the people onstage are having more fun than you.

Still, despite its lapses and longueurs, “Love’s Labor’s Lost” remains in this version a fascinating and feelingful taste of Shakespeare to come. And if in his later works he generally improved on many of the tricks pioneered here, that too is apt. Like those tricks, this musical, as it develops for future productions, may one day improve on its first, green outing.

Love’s Labor’s Lost
Through Aug. 27 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.