The Worst Shakespeare Production I Have Ever Seen

 I am not, in general, a great defender of As You Like It. The two themes in the air of the time which it made fun of - pastoral and melancholy - have long passed out of the common ken; it has even less plot than most Shakespeare comedies; it has remained popular primarily because of the character of Rosalind.

That being said, it has its points.  It is full of clever speech; it is, I believe, the first Shakespeare play with a Robert Armin fool rather than a Will Kemp fool, and so the first of his philosophic fools. It has a really clear distinction between the comic and everyday worlds which makes it a sort of concentrated template for Shakespeare's other festive comedies. ("How full of briars is this workaday world" over against Arden).

The performance by the Canadian Stage Company at the Dream in High Park mangled the play so badly that none of its virtues survived. This wasn't just the usual cutting in the interests of length, though it involved liberal cutting. It also involved adding extended amounts of slapstick, not just where the text might call for it, but in many places where it could get in only by beating the text over the head. It has the most distracting costumes; I gather, after the fact, that for some reason the production presents all the characters as flowers. The court looks just as bizarre as Arden.

Much of Jaques and Touchstone was mangled or dropped, much to the detriment of both. At least they were not among the players who simply shouted their lines, or abbreviated versions of their lines.

It was, in short, an appalling production. I am disinclined to see any of their other productions.