Shakespeare audience to aim for fake mustache record

 

Not only characters in the play will be in disguise during Friday’s performance of As You Like It at the Shakespeare Festival. Audience members will be sporting fake mustaches – trying to set a world record.

Can local Shakespeare fans break a world record – for wearing fake mustaches?

That’s the plan tomorrow night at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival.

The festival is shooting for a new record for the most people wearing fake mustaches at a theatrical event. You can get a fake mustache at the gate or wear your own, and you can then get into a picture with other audience members thus disguised.

Friday is opening night for the Festival’s production of  As You Like.

Executive Artistic Director Sidonie Garrett says fake mustaches are appropriate for As You Like because the heroine Rosalind disguises herself as a man when she is banished to the forest. However, Garrett says fake mustaches are particularly appropriate for this production because it is set in 1967’s Summer of Love with a cast of hippies sporting plenty of facial hair.

The show is a romantic comedy complete with live 60’s music. Garrett says her decision to set As You Like It  in the counterculture of the 1960’s is less radical than it might seem. Shakespeare wrote the play in 1599, a time that had a lot in common with the 1960’s. England’s war with rebels in Ireland was going badly, and English citizens were experiencing oppression, censorship, political rebellion and high crime rates.

The cast includes: Carla Noack as Rosalind; Todd Carlton Lanker as Orlando; John Rensenhouse as Duke Senior; Mark Robbins as Duke Fredrick;  Bruce Roach as Jacques; Jacques Roy as Touchstone; Matthew Rapport as Oliver; Cinnamon Schultz as Celia; Scott Cordes as Corin; Michael Rapport as Adam; Jake Walker as Silvius; and Emily Peterson as Phoebe. Rounding out the cast are actors Ben Auxier, Phillip Shinn and J. Will Fritz, Mary Glen Fredrick, Matthew Schmidli and Andy Perkins.

Details

  • As You Like It will be performed at 8 p.m. through July 7, 2013, Tuesday through Sunday evenings and Monday, July 1.  There is no show on July 4.
  • Festival website