Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Mad Love, Mad Music

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night meets the intoxicating madness of music from the Roaring 1920s Jazz Age in a production adapted and directed by David Feldshuh for Cornell’s Department of Performing and Media Arts. Twelfth Night features a cast of twenty-two including fourteen actors, a singing chorus, dancers, and the onstage presence of professional jazz musician, Mike Carbone, on the saxophone and flute.

Free tickets are available at https://pma.cornell.edu/tickets. The show will take place in the Kiplinger Theatre in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts at the following times.

• Friday, October 23, 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday, October 24, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, October 30, 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday, October 31, 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, and the characters find themselves in Illyria. In Feldshuh’s production Illyria is a dreamscape inspired by the surrealist painter, Rene Magritte, a place where identity is fluid, love is passionately unpredictable, and anything can happen.

“Although Illyria is filled with comic characters and music, it’s surrounded by a world at war and darker forces are at work in between the comedy,” notes Feldshuh. “Twelfth Night is a complex comedy. Practical jokes become cruel and humiliation becomes a weapon. Shakespeare’s talent is to find a way to reflect our real world, a balance of light and dark.”

“Twelfth Night has captured, delighted, and intrigued audiences in a dizzying variety of productions for over four hundred years,” said Feldshuh. “Exploring this extraordinary play with dedicated, Cornell students in collaboration with professional theatre artists has been a rich, dramatic adventure.”

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