Review: CYMBELINE at The ARTS At Mark's Garage

Hawaii Shakespeare Festival’s 23rd season kicked off on Friday, July 12th with one of the Bard’s lesser-known works, the tragicomedy of Cymbeline. But if we are to look at this Festival’s trio of shows as a curated three-course meal, with the gorefest of Titus Andronicus as the main course and the charming As You Like It for dessert, Reyn Afaga’s Cymbeline has no business as a mere appetizer. This show is doing the absolute most, and looms even larger when one realizes that this is Afaga’s directorial debut! He didn’t so much dip his toe into the world of directing as he cannonballed straight into the deep end, soaking the audience with Gen X nostalgia and more twists and turns and overlapping storylines than a Scooby Doo marathon.

The two-and-a-half-hour romp jumps straight into convoluted relationships and character development, aided only by some clever lighting by Rachel Sorenson and fun costuming choices by Afaga’s drag persona Babingka Jones. For a show whose plot is aptly summarized by Afaga himself as “all of the Bard’s great works thrown into a blender on puree”, it felt appropriate to set the show in the world of excess and “keep up or get left behind” of the 1980s. Scene transitions were accented by 80s bops such as “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Somebody’s Watching Me”, the women were coiffed into some serious Farrah Fawcett feathering, and iconic references to “Wayne’s World”, “Say Anything”, and even a solid sendup of Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny” with Julia LoPresti’s Soothsayer were on display. These cultural touchpoints were essential to lightening the mood of the surprisingly violent plot, best executed in a battle scene that felt like watching “Red Dawn” choreographed by Benny Hill.

Within this Tab-fueled wonderland, some really delightful performances captured my attention. Kirstyn Trombetta as the beleaguered princess Imogen is at the center of it all (to the point where I’m surprised the play wasn’t titled Imogen), and she handles the majority of the emotional heavy lifting with wit, charm, and surprising ease. Jason Kanda doing double duty throwing shade as a bodyguard and orchestrating several denouements as an exiled former Briton soldier really got to stretch his range, and was stalwart yet dynamic in his delivery. Andy Valencia as the Queen was a villainous delight in purple and blood red and velvet and leopard, with the strut and the contempt to match. But it was crowd favorite Brando Cutts who stole the show, if nothing else than for a truly iconic bedroom scene that was Shakespearian philandering at its finest.

If Cymbeline is a sign of things to come for the rest of ShakesFest, then audiences are in for a big, bombastic, and sensory-overload summer. Though I have no doubt that Titus director Taurie Kinoshita will be more than up for the challenge of following Cymbeline, I like to imagine that Afaga has lovingly mic-dropped in the vein of 1989’s “Teen Witch”: top that!

Cymbeline runs Wednesday-Saturday from July 12-21, 2024.

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