As You Like it a joyous celebration of love.

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All you need is love.

In his pastoral comedy As You Like It, Shakespeare insisted that love, whether romantic love, or love of family, country, nature, or even philosophies,  gives meaning and fulfillment to a person’s life. Themes of love pervade the 229 songs The Beatles wrote during the decade the foursome spent together, and love was the mantra of the Flower Power generation of the 1960s.

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The mashup of Shakespeare, Beatles and the mind-expanding escapism of the hippie generation seems such a natural in Theatre Calgary’s As You Like It, but that’s only because of the creative genius of Daryl Cloran, who conceived, adapted and directed this joyous celebration of love in its numerous incarnations.

From the outset of this high-spirited musical romp, it’s obvious that a great deal of love, and an even greater deal of talent, has gone into creating Cloran’s As You Like It. Musical director Ben Elliott cleverly tweaks the Beatles songs so they are instantly recognizable, but also serve the plot twists and characterizations in Shakespeare’s play. Elliott, and thus the audience, is served by a talented onstage band whose five members double as characters in the play.

Jonathan Hawley Purvis’s choreography is simple but effective, looking more natural than staged, as do Pam Johnson’s sets, Carmen Alatorre’s costumes, Gerald King’s lighting designs, and Alistair Wallace’s sound designs. At all levels, great care has been taken to make the production serve the concept.

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Cloran’s touch is everywhere from the hilarious preshow wrestling antics to the way he allows characters to speak directly to the audience to keep the evening as light-hearted and buoyant as possible. Call it a dose of creative helium. His greatest accomplishment is how he has skillfully woven the Beatles’ songs into Shakespeare’s text about banished lovers and mistaken identity.

The play boasts a dynamite cast of triple-threat performers who sing, dance and act as if all disciplines are second nature, and some are also required to play instruments and even wrestle.

Chelsea Rose and Oscar Derkx are the smitten, games-playing young lovers Rosalind and Orlando. She is the cat, and he is her plaything, much to the audience’s delight. Both are exceptional singers, whether in their solos or a duet like I Want to Hold Your Hand.

We see lustful love through the coupling of Touchstone (Andrew Cownden) and the earthy shepherdess Audrey (Jenny McKillop), just two of Shakespeare’s memorable clowns. Nadien Chu plays both the tyrant Dame Francis and her gentle sister Dame Senior, essentially showing us the shades of character that can exist in the same person.

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The shepherd Silvius is meant to show the destructive nature of unrequited love, but Anton Lipovetsky makes him such a winning and willing lapdog that Silvius is never pitiful or pitiable, and rightfully so because he has one of the most beautiful speeches in the play. Lipovetsky’s renditions of I Saw Her Standing There, and Love Me Do are highlights in a show stacked with memorable moments.

Also a stand out in this stellar cast is Jan Alexandra Smith, as the misanthropic Jacques who is the only one not moved, or changed, by all the frivolity in the forest. Smith brings the character’s melancholy to I Am A Walrus and The Fool on the Hill, and delivers, with aplomb and poignancy, Shakespeare’s famous speech about the seven ages of man.

If indeed, all you need is love, you are going to get a great deal of it in the three hours you’ll spend in the Max Bell Theatre, which, until March 24, has been transformed into the Okanagan of the 1960s.

Theatre’ Calgary’s As You Like It plays in Max Bell Theatre until March 24.

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