Love's Labour's Lost

Next time you’re picking up produce at the weekly Winter Park farmers market, step inside and sneak past the bread vendor. Down a narrow hallway, you’ll discover a diminutive but delightful museum documenting Winter Park’s history. The current exhibit features photographs from the 1960s, when the peace-and-love generation paraded down Park Avenue. Director Eric Zivot has managed to evoke some of the fashion and passion of that era in Rollins College’s groovy new production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Ferdinand (Matt Striegel) is lord of Navarre, which bears a suspicious similarity to a certain small Central Florida school. He talks his pals Longaville (Tuquan Smith), Dumaine (Peter Ruiz) and Berowne (Brian Hatch) into forswearing women for three years in favor of solemn academic study, and bans women from his grounds. The Princess of France (Kaitlyn Schirard) appears to parley with Ferdinand, with her wooable attendants Maria (Emily Steward), Katharine (Shannon Lynch) and Rosaline (Jaz Zepatos) in tow. Naturally, the boys each fall in love, and have to don silly disguises to circumvent their vows.

Simultaneously, stumbling Spaniard Don Armado (Ryan Bathurst) is aided by jovial jughead Costard (Ryan Lambert) and Little Leaguer pageboy Moth (Anastasia Herbert) in his pursuit of Jaquenetta (Stephane Leone), a Daisy Duke coquette whose every entrance cues a clip of “Whatever Lola Wants.” The final strand involves hippie Holofernes (Ricci Prioletti) and square Sir Nathaniel (Chris Sutter), two schoolteachers who snack on space cakes and corral corpulent cop Dull (Matt Hendry) into performing a play-ending pageant. This is a comedy because none of the leads die at the end, but unusually for a Shakespeare comedy there’s no wedding either.

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