New Theater in South Florida opens its 25th season with The Tempest, its 15th entry as it works through the Shakespeare canon. Adapted by director John Manzelli for the Coral Gables theater, this version of the late-Shakespeare play is set in the early 1900s, allowing the assorted nobles who have washed up on Prospero's island to wear derby hats and Edwardian-cut jackets. A nice touch is that the jacket backs bear the crests of the appropriate nobles, Milan or Naples, but the embellishments are so poorly executed, they distract more than they enhance. Music, choreography and casting at times suggest a leafy locale, but a painted flat on an otherwise efficient set evokes thoughts of the North-African desert.
The production too often seems a workmanlike but generic riff on the evils of colonialism. The Tempest tells what happens when usurped prince Prospero a bookish magician and single dad conjures up a way to bring, among others, his usurper brother and a dashing young man to the island he and his now-teenaged daughter have shared for 12 years. Also on the island all that time: Caliban, the angry and abused son of a witch, and Ariel, the witch's long-ago servant, now doing Prospero's bidding. Caliban emerges from under the New Theater stage and spends much subsequent time in chains and crawling. Ariel is physically unfettered, but still under Prospero's power; in this telling she is brassy, lively and sometimes too loud, but not really dainty, as Shakespeare and director Manzelli have Prospero address her.
The production does, however, neatly etch the schemes of nobles Antonio and Sebastian as well as the almost cloying optimism of honest aide and the troubled regrets of King Alonso. And there are scattered moments of great effect: Prospero's epilogue, certainly, but also the play's opening tableau, which seems to be a landscape until the little rises and rocks come to life, revealing themselves as the men who have made it to shore in the storm.
