Twelfth Night Off-Broadway Reviews

The Nyong’o siblings’ casting sounds like a gimmick, but the payoff is exquisite: the twins, dazed at their reunion, establishing the truth of their identity as they talk to each other in Swahili. For the audience, too, this “Twelfth Night” is a kind of reunion — with the Delacorte, a vital space that New York theatergoers depend on, and missed. It speaks our language.

Shenanigans like these aren’t unenjoyable, but neither are they entirely fulfilling. It’s a happy relief, therefore, that Oh blows through this Twelfth Night like, as Orsino might say, the sweet wind “that breathes upon a bank of violets, / Stealing and giving odor.” Her Olivia is a giddy, glowing delight — playful and sexy and grounded, as full and compelling a human being as this production will allow. She finds the play’s joy without resorting to gimmick, accessing her character’s essential truth and beauty while still allowing for the exuberant artifice of farce. In her, one can glimpse a broader, deeper Illyria, a Twelfth Night that — because it is as full of wondering as of wonders — is indeed most wonderful.

There are so many reasons to be excited by director Saheem Ali’s production of Shakespeare’s comically convoluted tale of mistaken identity and addled affection. It was inspired to cast Lupita Nyong’o and her brother Junior Nyong’o as the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are split apart during a shipwreck and make their separate ways through Illyria.

The biggest strength of this current production—beyond its general jubilant mood—is its central casting: a real-life brother-sister duo, Junior Nyong’o and Lupita Nyong’o, as the play’s shipwrecked siblings, Sebastian and Viola, respectively.

The disparate elements come together, more or less, combining for a wholly satisfying evening. Albeit one with little of the exuberance that has marked various Shakespeare in the Park outings going back to the 1971 rock musical rethinking of Two Gentlemen of Verona and the glorious Civil War-era Much Ado About Nothing as well as the more recent Comedy of Errors and As You Like It. Even so, this Twelfth Night does a satisfactory job of leaving the audience beaming, and that, after all, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

A triumphant gender-defying curtain call, costumed in glorious technicolor by Oana Botez, further challenges the recent assault on creative expression and the arts, demonstrating that joy is an act of resistance. And there’s nothing more joyful than the return of Shakespeare in the Park.

The production is pretty well-cast all around. Lupita Nyong’o and her brother Junior Nyong’o are the shipwrecked twins and, aside from their height disparity, are nearly identical in Oana Botez’s costumes and Krystal Balleza’s hair design. Viola and Sebastian’s eventual reunion at the end of the play is wrought with the kind of palpable, historied connection that only real-life siblings can bring.

Not that Twelfth Night needs to wave a rainbow flag to succeed. But this production departs from other recent revivals in taking a humbler, less transgressive approach to the various romantic entanglements. Even in the curtain call, when the cast reassembles in colorful new outfits as part of a drag-ball sendoff, the show seems to be conjuring a party atmosphere for which there’s no overarching agenda. The message seems to be: Come as you are, love what you will. And to rechristen a venue that’s both fresh and familiar, a welcome beacon of summer fun, perhaps that’s enough.

These comedies are intrinsically musical, peppered with songs of the time. Accordingly, composer Michael Thurber’s vibrant, polyglot score excels, with pieces for an all-women string quartet, a jazzy art song for Sumney and even a burst of Elizabethan rap for Viola. In addition to the natural musicality of Shakespeare’s verse, we also hear bewitching fragments of Swahili (translated from the source) when Viola and Sebastian fall back into their native tongue. Dialect coach Karishma Bhagani and the Nyong’o siblings weave these lilting, wonderful notes into a swoon-worthy night’s symphony.

Between bicycles, bongs, beatboxing, and buffoonery cranked to the max, playfulness rules in director Saheem Ali’s contemporary staging. That’s a viable approach to this 400-plus-year-old play — it’s a romantic comedy, after all. Nonetheless, like the richest rom-coms, Twelfth Night can cut deep when it matters most. Separated siblings get a life-and-death wake-up call. A melancholy woman gets her groove back. Here, though, the heavy emphasis on lightheartedness mutes the more serious edges of the play that can summon deeper emotions around these key elements.