Theatre Review: 'The Winter's Tale' Thaws The Heart With Magic, Melodrama

LOS ANGELES TIMES
By Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Theater Critic

CALIFORNIA---The difficulty of staging "The Winter's Tale" is legendary. Characters are at the mercy of a crazy plot that wildly mixes genres and tones, there is a leap of 16 years between the third and fourth acts and one stage direction (perhaps the most famous in all of Shakespeare) reads "Exit pursued by a bear." In making his directing debut at the Old Globe with this late romance of Shakespeare's, artistic director Barry Edelstein clearly isn't playing it safe. But he knows the play intimately, having staged it off-Broadway at the Classic Stage Company, and in this new production he has enlisted a core group of actors who bring refreshing clarity to what is undeniably a tricky text. Best of all, the emotion of this play about a marriage mangled and restored, children rejected and embraced, and loved ones bitterly parted and reunited is powerfully delivered. [link]