As You Like It – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – November 30, 2021

I’m bad with names, but better with faces. What I didn’t know until I saw Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s As You Like It last night, is that I’m good with thighs (and not just those on the Thanksgiving turkey), or rather quadriceps, as that sounds better, until I recognized the actor playing Orlando as having the same ridiculously muscular legs as I saw when he played the lead in the production of Memphis I saw three-and-a-half years ago at Porchlight Music Theatre.

I don’t go to a lot of Shakespeare, but this show is as I like it, in that it incorporates 23 Beatles songs into the script, along with some off-hand jokes that undoubtedly rile true Bard of Avon aficionados, and starts with a band and a modern-day wrestling match (more riling), even before the obsolete, often unintelligible English dialogue that is Shakespeare jumps in (wouldn’t supertitles be great?), with the match acting as a prologue and a way of entertaining those of us who get there early to avoid the proof-of-vaccination backup at the door, the sight of which made me wonder whether there were similar lines during the 1665 Great Plague of London.