Shakespeare in the Park’s Twelfth Night is Both Pleasant and Facile

Photo: Joan Marcus

The last time I wrote about Twelfth Night at the Public’s Delacorte Theater, I took issue with a performance that sacrificed the play’s rich ambiguities for a relentless sing-along perkiness, a too-wide smile that, while part of a meaningful civic project, lacked theatrical teeth. Now, the whirligig of time has brought all three of us back around: Twelfth Night, in a fancy new production directed by Saheem Ali and featuring Lupita Nyong’o, Sandra Oh, and Peter Dinklage; the Delacorte...