Review: ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL at Old Globe Theatre

Friskiness and romp are on the menu as the summer Shakespeare festival at San Diego’s venerable Old Globe Theatre (90 years running) gets underway for 2025. No cross-dressing, No Falstaff or forest hijinks. No twins (well, not yet. COMEDY OF ERRORS hits the Globe boards in late July). But there’s plenty of funny accents, general goofiness, and l’amour, ah, toujours l’amour. When your playbill arrives equipped with the lyrics to “Let me call you Sweetheart” for a curtain-closing sing-along, love must be in the air.

Well, on one side at least… yes it kind of is, although the tale before us is ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, probably the sourest and least romantic of Shakespeare’s comedies. For his production of ALL’S WELL, director Peter Francis James has much to work with including plenty of solid actors (vets and University of San Diego students alike) and an equally strong technical team, but the production’s frothy overlay often feels off key. Granted, all will end “well,” but this is a “love” story with a single romantic storyline in which the man (who is no prize) is forced into a marriage he doesn’t want and ultimately tricked into accepting. All together now, everyone and put some spice into it… “Let me call you sweetheart…”

James contextualizes this tale through the lens of comedy both high and low. We’ve got thick French accents, a Florentine duke with a goofy hat that he enjoys shaking. There are soldiers riding stick ponies, a pair of chippy lords named Dum and Dee whose raison d’etre is to gull a buffoonish braggart. We have a servant whose deadpan delivery would take the prize of any competition in drollery. Infused with a busybody energy, Mary Lou Rosato’s Countess of Roussillion is nearly as comedic as her fool.

And at the center of the proceedings, we have as our action instigator Ismenia Mendes’s Helena, who we meet uttering an over-the-top sob before she giggles, squeals and nervously tics her way through the ensuing five acts. Enacting Count Bertram, the highly born, feckless and decidedly unworthy object of Helena’s affection, Gabriel Brown dispatches has a winning smile, some energy in the comic segments and not much else. That the play’s only romantic pair spend precious little stage time together is Shakespeare’s doing. That Mendes and Brown can muster barely a soupcon of chemistry is the production’s lack.

As a reminder, Helena, the gentlewoman to the Countess is secretly in love with her son Bertram. When Bertram departs for the French court to serve the King of France (Tim Nelis) who is seriously ill from a fistula. The daughter of a physician, Helena follows Bertram to the court, striking a bargain with the king that if she can cure him, he will grant her the husband of her choice among any eligible lords. This she does, and the king keeps his word. Helena chooses a none-too-pleased Betram who declares of his lower-born friend “I can not love her, nor will strive to do’t” but is forced to submit anyway. The marriage is performed, but Bertram refuses to consummate it or recognize Helen as his wife unless she can meet some crazy conditions. He lights out for the Italian wars along with his cowardly companion Parolles (Barzin Akhavan). With the assistance of a widow and her daughter Diana (Angelynne “Ajay” Pawaan) who Betram is trying to seduce, Helena manages to fulfil Betram’s terms and end things well.  

So the play is an underdog heroine’s triumph against impossible odds, a resolution more easily rooted for when the lady in question is more winning.  The comedically solid Mendes parries well in her verbal jaunts with Akhavan’s Parolles and is creditably humble in her interactions with royalty, but the schticky nervousness gets grating and the hellbent devotion to a man that hates her seems to come out of nowhere.

From a comedic perspective, the players surrounding Helena are more than just well. With his Frencher than French accent Arthur Hanket’s Lafew is a lord not to be messed with. Madi Goff and Kevin Alicea-Minor infuse some sprightly oomph into Lords Dee and Dum, the orchestrators of the plot to expose Parolles. As the Duke of Florence, Conner Keef is having a high old time playing at war games as he prances his way across a giant floor map. And in his rendering of a role not generally designed to generate yuks, lord of the deadpan Erick Lindsey deftly filches his scenes as the Countess’s news-delivering steward Rinaldo.

Overall, the laughs and the energy are present in abundance. All is well, not great.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL plays through July 6 in Balboa Park San Diego.   

Photo credit: Rich Soublet II

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