Part One: The Globe’s Edelstein makes Globe history and conjures comedy, tragedy and history with Henry 6 Part One

While patrons take their seats in the outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, mannequins sit center stage. As the play opens, the arms of three actors recapitulate the play hinting at a famous line from Shakespeare’s Henry the IV Part 2 “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” presaging the battle for kingship to come. The English fighting amongst themselves and the French in the War of the Roses.

Mixing excellently timed comic moments with death and mal intentioned court intrigue, adapter and director Barry Edelstein deploys traditional 15^th century garb, some late 20^th century technology and even California beach slang – all, in one case, to boost our sense of the boy King and, in another, to bridge the long recitation of the Book of Genesis-like hereditary history of the line of kingship.

Shakespeare and his probable collaborators created three plays. (Unwinding who wrote what takes a doctoral dissertation.) 2024’s Old Globe first ever production of the plays brings the contents of all three together in two parts peppered with comedic moments, unexpected in a play with so much royal in-fighting where people die. Shakespeare’s Part I stands in its entirety with some Edelstein borrowings from the overlapped action in Shakespeare’s Part II. (Henry 6 Part Two staged by the Globe picks up in Part II and includes Part III as written by the Bard.)  Staging this makes the Globe one of only a few who have presented the entire Shakespearean canon.

The casting (Alaine Alldaffer, CSA and Lisa Donadio) is one of the finest most entertaining I’ve seen at the Old Globe, which includes large parts played by students in The Old Globe and University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program:  presentations are well spoken, believable and allow the theater audience to be subsumed into the action.  (Jim Parsons, the Sheldon Cooper lead character in TV’s “The Big Bang Theory”, is among the alumni of the USD/Globe collaboration.)

Joan la Pucelle (aka Joan of Arc) played by Cassia Thompson struts on stage with divine authority.  Ian Lassiter’s Duke of Gloucester goes from confident minder of the king to despairing and discarded.

The adult male that plays the King succeeds for a time to be the boy.  Henry VI was 9 months old when his father Henry V died of dysentery fighting in France.  Gloucester was Lord Protector until and even well after Henry was deemed worthy of rule (and marriage) at age 15.

King Henry VI – crowned at 9 months old but played here as the teenager by Keshav Moodliar at first glance looks too old to be 12 or 15 but quickly morphs into a restless youth. Later, the speeches and adult like commands, drop that costume and it’s tough to remember his tender age.

Greg Mozgala’s Suffolk, motivated first by love, but echoing the Bard’s evil character Iago from the play Othello (presaging his emergence as the bloody Richard III) so well presents his fervent and ambitious scheme to rule through the King’s wife as mistress that elicits sympathy just until he engineers the death of a rival, causing the King to despair.

Talbot as enacted by Tally Sessions rages and earns his Talbotic reputation from the text as a warrior who inspires two soldiers to say that just his name scares the enemy off, though – in a faux sword fight – it did seem he went down a little quickly.

The first fight between Talbot and Joan is so slow and muted it seems like two children who mimic a sword fight but sets the expectation for later sword brawls representing battle. And there is lots of slow-motion fighting, actors running across the stage and an angry shadowy crowd silhouetted in the back. Fights directed by Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum with choreography by Chelsey Arce.

Margaret as played by Elizbeth A. Davis makes the most significant transition from diminished chain gang prisoner to ardent lover to regal and powerful ruler of the King her husband – stretching her acting talents to their fullest while feigning damsel in distress with a clearly mocking tone that would be misunderstood as overacting in a less talented performer.

Lighting (Mextly Couzin) and set design (Lawrence E. Moten III with projection by Caite Hevner) make for what looks like LCD monitors and projection on columns and walls that shifts the mood and sense of location, even becoming a Greek chorus as Joan’s voice of a conjured God and as the spirits conjured later by a doomed wizard.  A clever rotating stage and plunging platform center stage raises throne and beds and pyres up to the action.

We get soft jazz and hip hop mixed into the mood music provided by a live guitar (Martin Martiarena), a synthesizer, recorded music and a drummer (Nathan Hubbard) in a balcony overlooking the stage, some original music by Julan Mesri and sound design by Melanie Chen Cole.

With a nod to the 21^st century sensibility for pronouns, the Duke of Burgundy is referred to as “she.”  In Shakespeare’s time, men often played female parts and that’s often reversed in today’s theatre.

In another nod to modern mores of gender identity, by the Bard from centuries back, Elenor (Mahira Kakkar), Gloucester’s wife – woven into Part One using what Shakespeare wrote in Part II – has a chance to rant about the low borne place of women in 17^th century society. Her fate as tied to her husband foretold in the rant.

All in all, an entertaining dip into Shakespeare and what, for many, will be their first live performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VI.

Henry 6 Part One runs through September 14