On Stage by Rachel Frick Cardelle

‘As You Like It’: Peace, Love and Shakespeare on Otsego Lake

There was a professor at the University of Rochester named Russell Peck who gave his students a piece of advice that Michael Tamburrino has never forgotten. When you find yourself living through difficult times, Peck told them, it’s time to revisit “As You Like It,” because that’s probably what you and the world need right now.

Michael took that advice to heart and is directing “As You Like It” for the Glimmer Globe Theatre at the Fenimore Art Museum’s lakeside Lucy B. Hamilton Amphitheater.

“In spite of the little bit of violence that happens toward the beginning,” he told me, “it is Shakespeare’s most peaceful, elegant play. It feels like a vacation to me, which is kind of what I need right now. And I think it’s what a lot of people need right now.”

There is a lot that Michael clearly loves about “As You Like It,” as do Victoriana Alfonso, who plays Rosalind, and Tanner Griffin, who plays Orlando. I interviewed all three of them on a hot day at the end of June, curious how the production was going. Our conversation ranged from the uniqueness of this Shakespeare play, to how Michael has envisioned this production, to Victoriana and Tanner’s involvement, and how they are all enjoying the challenge of this Shakespeare play.

As the director, Michael chose to set the play in 1969 with a Woodstock-style festival. The themes that he wanted to draw out of the play—environmental stewardship, the feminist revolution, resistance to a repressive political climate—map, as Michael puts it, “really, really well” onto the late 1960s.

Michael also likes, he told me, to give a nod to other things happening at the Fenimore, and currently there is a stunning collection of Linda McCartney’s photography on show there. Linda and Paul McCartney, as it happens, met in 1969.

“It’s interesting to plug in Linda McCartney too, because she was a famous vegetarian. There’s a famous vegetarian in this show, Jaques [the character who gives the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech]. Linda was also an environmental activist, and the show is full of that kind of stuff, too; the trees are the thing in our production,” Michael explained.

“So, instead of the play starting in a royal court, our production is starting in a logging camp with a billboard in the back, and Duke Frederick is kicking out his brother and taking control because he’s bitter and resentful,” he continued. “He’s pinning up a sign that says ‘Under New Management’ to the billboard, and the trees are all in the process of being chopped to bits on the stage, and so Duke Frederick, instead of ruling over a kingdom, he’s the CEO of this big logging company, and once Orlando and Rosalind are exiled for paranoiac Nixonian reasons, we go out into the forest, the trees will come alive, and everyone comes in when the music starts.”

The show features original music composed and performed by Carl Loewenguth, who plays the musician Amiens in the production—a rock star headlining the Arden Festival of Music, the festival in the last scene of the play that invokes the Woodstock vibe.

Michael makes the case persuasively that “As You Like It” may be the closest thing Shakespeare ever wrote to a musical: It is a romantic comedy, episodic in structure, full of physical and verbal humor, with a large cast of young performers and more individually-sung songs than any other Shakespeare play.

“It feels like Shakespeare imagining a genre that doesn’t quite exist yet,” Michael said, “pushing at the boundaries.”

The original music in this production leans into that quality, and the festival setting gives it room to breathe.

Now, into the forest we go.

For those coming to the play fresh: When Rosalind flees into the forest, she does so in the disguise of a young man she names Ganymede. Once there, she encounters Orlando—who has also fled, and who is hopelessly in love with Rosalind—but he doesn’t recognize her as Ganymede. She then proposes, still as Ganymede, to cure Orlando of his lovesickness by having him practice wooing Ganymede, pretending that Ganymede is Rosalind. Which means that for much of the play, Victoriana is a woman playing a man playing a woman, while the man she loves has no idea any of this is happening.

“Rosalind is the largest role Shakespeare ever wrote for a female character,” Victoriana told me. “I was so excited to be able to work on something so large.”

But it’s not the sheer volume of text that has pushed her; it’s the dizzying layering Rosalind requires. And, she needs to do this using Shakespeare’s script in a 1969 setting!

“She’s a woman [Rosalind] pretending to be a man [Ganymede] who then pretends to be Rosalind—that layer is the hardest and most fun,” Victoriana admitted.

Playing Ganymede, Rosalind’s male persona, has forced Victoriana to find a new physical and vocal ease.

“I have to find my chill dude,” she laughed.

Victoriana graduated from SUNY Oneonta in 2025, and after a stint downstate trying to break into the theater there, she returned upstate, took work in Oneonta and reconnected with regional theater networks—a route that led directly to the Fenimore production. Her lived experience as she seeks to make a life for herself in theater, she said, helps inform Rosalind’s interior life: it’s not just that Rosalind hides her identity, but that exile offers her a chance to strip away courtly expectations.

“She gets to really revel in the fact that, okay, this is a man’s world, so now it’s my world,” Victoriana said. “When it’s a scene, for example, where Rosalind’s with Orlando, I kind of shift throughout the dialog between Rosalind and Ganymede. There are moments where I can let Rosalind shine through Ganymede’s persona, which is fun. So I think it’s really just about having fun playing with it, seeing the moments where there’s room for humor in playing up Ganymede or playing down Ganymede, and letting Rosalind come out.”

Opposite her, Tanner—a current student at SUNY Oneonta and a familiar face to local audience members who attend those productions—is Orlando, the play’s romantic center. Tanner admits the role carries the burden of centuries of idealized male heroes: “It’s one of those Shakespeare men who are supposed to be charming and perfect,” he said.

His strategy has been honesty: “You don’t have to do everything right, you just have to mean what you do,” he observed. The 1969 setting helps, he told me.

“It makes a huge difference. It takes away a lot of the sense of propriety that comes with playing characters in Shakespeare, and strips all that away. Especially with the hippie-esque kind of people, and the sense of freedom that they encourage. I think Orlando’s inner self wants to express all of this love that he has, and just live his life as he wants to live it, not by someone else’s rules. I think that character fits perfectly in with the 60s and how people were acting back then. I think it makes the character easier to play than it would be in the original setting,” Tanner said.

As we talked about bringing this show to life, the three I was interviewing reflected on the work required to make Shakespeare’s work accessible. They talked about the wit of Ganymede’s “snail speech” to Orlando, the brilliance of the “all the world’s a stage” speech, and how the meaning of Shakespeare’s language in these speeches can be understood and best conveyed to a modern audience.

It brought to mind a recent, very expensive, and very disappointing experience I had when I attended “Othello” on Broadway. [If you follow Broadway news, you’ll guess I’m talking about the production with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, which broke records for the top-grossing Broadway play in history.] In that show, I felt the actors fell far short of the mark of conveying both the beauty and meaning of the play’s language; and, for the record, I love “Othello” and both those actors. Now, having seen all three of my interviewees’ stage work (Victoriana and Tanner at SUNY Oneonta, and Michael at Hartwick College and the Fenimore), I am confident I’ll have a very different experience at the Fenimore, at a fraction the cost!

I look forward to having my love of Shakespeare revived with this production of “As You Like It.” Given that Michael’s hope is for the show to be a small vacation—“a breath of fresh air” after a heavy stretch of politics and headlines—the production’s mix of reclamation and revelry aims to deliver just that. The Arden at the Fenimore will be less a literal forest than a gathering: trees rebuilt, songs sung and a Rosalind trying on agency in the guise of a man’s jacket. All this plus original music by another local community member? That’s my kind of rom-com!

William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” directed by Michael Tamburrino with original music by Carl Loewenguth, runs from July 15 through August 13 at the Lucy B. Hamilton Amphitheater with performances every Wednesday and Thursday at 7 p.m. Tickets are available online or at the Fenimore Art Museum. Cost: $20.00, adult; $12.00 for juniors (7-17 years old); $18.00 for seniors and members; those under 6 admitted free. Run time: three hours.

Rachel Frick Cardelle covers performing arts at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.