The Detroit Free Press, August 16, 2005
Measure for Measure a pleasure
By: Martin F. Kohn
Leon Rubin's staging of Shakespeare's morality tale starts out looking like the Cirque du Soleil version of "Cabaret," with scantily dressed dancers gyrating in trapeze-like hoops suspended above the floor, and words like "Sin box" and "hotte" lit up in neon on the theater walls, and actors working the aisles offering audience members vaguely illicit delights after the show.
This is cause for concern -- not the idea that actors might be promoting some business on the side but that Rubin is recapitulating the circus-like gimmickry that characterized his production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" last year. Not to worry. The trappings are short-lived and exist to establish the widespread licentiousness that the new ruler, Angelo, is bent on cleaning up. Statutes must be enforced, he says.
Angelo is bent indeed. A harsh and unfeeling moralist, he sentences a man, Claudio, to death for fornication. Claudio asks his sister, Isabella, a strict and virtuous would-be nun, to plead his case before Angelo.
To his chagrin, Angelo discovers he is capable of having emotions, but not in a good way. He makes Isabella an indecent proposal: her virginity for her brother's freedom, thus exposing his hypocrisy. Angelo is even worse: He'll have Claudio executed no matter what.
Fortunately, the lenient duke who appointed Angelo to clean up the city sticks around disguised as a friar and can set things straight.
"Measure" can be a coldly intellectual play but Rubin sends the blood of life coursing through it. Angelo and Isabella could come off as, respectively, an insufferable puritan and a tie-her-to-the-railroad-track villain. Jonathan Goad and Dana Green see to it that their characters are multi-dimensional. Jeffrey Wetsch plays Claudio as a nice guy who wants to do the right thing, and Thom Marriott is always a little mysterious as the duke whose actions and motives are ambiguous.
Three other actors are outstanding in comic roles: Don Carrier as Lucio, who tells the supposed friar what a lousy guy the duke is; Andrew Massingham as Pompey, a jailed pimp who will gladly assist the executioner in return for a lighter sentence, and Diane D'Aquila as Mistress Overdone, an overdressed brothel-keeper.
This production measures out its pleasures in abundance.