Ken Takata Ensemble “Music & As You Like It”

In this show, we’re featuring the many songs in one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, As You Like It. Most are new compositions, a necessity given that almost all of the original stage music has lost, but we will also feature a setting by Thomas Morley of “Under the Greenwood Tree” from 1600 that Shakespeare might have used.

Besides illustrating the musical styles in Shakespeare’s day, Morley’s song also gives us clues about how to handle one of the play’s central staging questions, namely:

Q: how do you portray the Forest of Arden, the main setting for the play?
Do you choose
• a realistic forest,
• a symbolic “forest of the mind,” or
• a forest that’s a disguised version of Duke Senior’s court?

The answer, somewhat surprisingly, can shift depending on what music you use. We’ll show this by performing several different settings of the same texts so that audience can hear this in action.

Besides songs from As You Like It, we’ll also feature material from other plays. Musical styles include glam rock, Western swing, European art song, early 1950s R&B, Scots-Irish folk music, New Orleans piano ballads, bossa nova, Weimer cabaret, jug band songs, homages to the Second Viennese School, period correct (i.e., circa 1600), parodies of radio ads from the 1940s, and several other genres, in other words, a little something for everyone.

Performances from Sarah Callahan, Sophie Caplin, Laura Lenz Landstad, and Sarah Zuber.
More details at https://kentakata.com