CSC's Shakespeare at Fenway Park

At Fenway, a magical night of Shakespeare

By Terry Byrne

 | Globe Correspondent   September 20, 2014

Brian Snyder/REUTERS

Actors Paul Melendy, left,  and Larry Coen were at a rehearsal at Fenway before Friday’s show.

An all-star lineup took the field — um, make that the stage — at Fenway Park Friday night for an enchanting evening of Shakespeare.

The event, which celebrated the start of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 20th anniversary, brought together an impressive collection of actors — from Seth Gilliam (“The Walking Dead”) and Zuzanna Szadkowski (“Gossip Girl”) to Mike O’Malley (“Glee”) and Maryann Plunkett (“House of Cards”) — for a selection of “greatest hits” from 10 of William Shakespeare’s plays. Artistic director Steven Maler welcomed the crowd of 4,500 and took to opportunity to announce that “King Lear” will be this summer’s production of free Shakespeare on the Boston Common.

After an introduction by Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner, complete with several of Shakespeare’s references to baseball (“Fair is foul and foul is fair”), a motley crew of Rude Mechanicals from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” bounded on stage — a 20-by-40-foot over the Red Sox dugout — to hand out roles in that comedy’s play-within-a-play. The audience seated in the stands above first base not only had a perfect view of the performance, but also a rare peek at Fenway’s beauty without the glare of field lights.

Once the Mechanicals adjourned to study their texts, Christian Coulson (“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”) arrived to offer Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, followed by his “nunnery” scene with Ophelia. Coulson’s intense focus was quite impressive; he never broke character, even when a fire alarm went off in the stands nearby.

The chilly evening was warmed by the smart, passionate performances of Bianca Amato and James Waterston from “Much Ado About Nothing”; the fraught scene between friends Kersti Bryan and Szadkowski from “Othello”; the innocent enthusiasm of Jenna Augen and Rupak Ginn in “Romeo and Juliet”; the playful repartee of Marianna Bassham and Kerry O’Malley in “Twelfth Night”; the fierce passion of Gilliam and cunning of Waterston in “Othello”; the giddy mix of triumph and terror in Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders in “Macbeth”; and the tantalizing battle of wills between Augen and Peter Cambor in “The Taming of the Shrew.” 

Interspersed among scenes were songs inspired by Shakespeare, sung by the extraordinary O’Malley, Max von Essen (who melted the crowd with “Something’s Coming” from “West Side Story”), Jason Butler Harner, who accompanied the Mill Town Rounders and delivered a soliloquy from “Richard II,” and Neal McDonough, who performed a sonnet, first lovingly to his wife via cellphone, and then with the darker strains of the heavies he often plays in film.

The evening closed with the entire cast gathered on stage for a hilarious performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” “Midsummer’s” play-wihtin-the-play. Local favorites Rick Park, Will LeBow, Paul Melendy, and Larry Coen joined Cambor and Mike O’Malley for a joyous ending to a truly magical evening of theater.