“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.”
So says Orsino, the lovestruck duke in the opening of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”
Director John Christian Plummer will have musicians play on when the romantic comedy opens tonight at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison.
Plummer, who lives in Cold Spring, is directing at the festival for the first time, but he’s well-acquainted with the Bard.
When he was fresh out of Tufts University — where he directed a “Twelfth Night” — he created the Albany-based Actors Shakespeare Company, which presented nearly two dozen productions over seven summers.
Plummer’s parents have lived in the area for 15 years or so, and his wife, actress Maia Guest — who plays Feste the clown in “Twelfth Night” — trod the Boscobel lawn in “The Rivals” two summers ago and was Phoebe in “As You Like It” more than a dozen years ago.
Regular HVSF patrons know that music always finds its way into the tent at the Boscobel Restoration, the festival’s home:

Two summers ago, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” included a free-standing “Men in Black” production number. But those types of numbers have been set to recorded music.
Plummer’s “Twelfth Night” has a live band — largely apprentices to the festival — playing everything from guitars and tambourines to a bass drum and an accordion. This “Twelfth Night” is full of songs, with lyrics by Shakespeare and music by Ray Bokhour, whom Plummer met while at Tufts.
“Feste, the clown, sings six songs through in the course of the play,” Plummer explains. “The bulk of the songs are written into the play and Ray wrote the music for them. He’s also written a tremendous amount of underscoring.”
“The apprentices are a band and a Greek chorus who become what the play requires of them,” he says.
Terrence O’Brien, the festival’s artistic director, sought out the apprentices at the University of Minnesota, the New School, NYU and Vassar. One, Jake Harms, just graduated from Cold Spring’s Haldane High School.
“(O’Brien) ran daylong improvisation workshops to get a sense of what they could do,” Plummer says. “He wanted to know how are they as creative artists, what is in their imaginations.”
Plummer took a couple of weeks of rehearsal before casting the apprentices. “Most of them are in this band and they’re on stage a tremendous amount,” he says. “Even if they don’t have a ton of lines, their responsibility is quite large and their sense of ownership of the show is really strong.”
The show they own is about shipwrecked twins, a duke with an unrequited love for a lady and the lengths to which men and women will go to find love. Viola spends much of the action disguised as Cesario, a servant to Orsino. Plummer’s approach to the work seems to mesh with O’Brien’s, with plenty of laughs.
“Terry’s ethos is complicated and multifaceted,” Plummer says, “but one key facet is that if the process is fun and collaborative and generous, then the show will be, too. And the audiences will receive that generosity. And I think the audiences do. That’s why they keep coming back.”
When Plummer and Guest — and their boys, Charlie and James — set up in Cold Spring, Guest reconnected with HVSF, joining the festival’s off-season school outreach program, taking Shakespeare to students. Plummer says he told O’Brien: “I haven’t done theater in a while, but I’d love to throw my hat in the ring if you’re looking for a director.”
When O’Brien asked which plays Plummer would like to direct, his short list was “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Twelfth Night” and “Measure for Measure.” As it turns out, O’Brien was considering “Much Ado” and “Twelfth Night” for this season.
“We were simpatico,” Plummer says.
Why “Twelfth Night”?
“It’s about as perfect as you get in a comedy,” Plummer says. “It’s a really balanced show in terms of the weight of the roles and the stories. All of the various plots balance really nicely in presenting a complex, varied portrait of life. No one is ever really the lead.”
He also likes that the show is about life.
“That opening line from Orsino is the whole play in a nutshell: Love, music, food, excess, surfeit, death,” he says. “Death is a huge factor in this show, and I think it gets short shrift a lot of times.
“The reason for death is to make us love life and live as fully as we can.”

“Twelfth Night”
Where: Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival at the Boscobel Restoration, Route 9D, Garrison.
When: Through August. In repertory with “Cymbeline” and “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).”
Tickets: $30 for Tuesdays through Thursdays, $38 for Fridays and Sundays and $44 on Saturdays.
Call: 845-265-7858
Web: www.hvshakespeare.org

Photo by Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News