Merry clowns shine in Rep's "Twelfe Night"

Clowns rule in Seattle Repertory Theatre's season-opening "Twelfe Night, Or What You Will" (the original title of a play commonly known as "Twelfth Night").

In his first staging of Shakespeare at the Rep as he heads into his fourth season as artistic director, David Esbjornson gives this many-faceted comedy a postmodern look, a fine verbal cogency and rigor — and an initial chilliness.

But soon, Esbjornson's buffoons warm it up and then some. Where they strut and gambol, one is happy to follow. And where they lead is into the play's bittersweet core.

Heading the pack is Charles Leggett as the wine-soaked, dyspeptic Sir Toby Belch. With this turn, the Seattle stage veteran makes one of those leaps that transform a serviceable actor into a superior one.

Along with his director, Leggett has searched the quizzical soul of that sly rogue Sir Toby, and found a dry-witted, melancholy misted wag, aware he's not made much of himself — other than making merriment.

A family retainer leeching off his wealthy niece Olivia (Cheyenne Casebier), Sir Toby amuses himself with dullards like Sir Anthony Aguecheek, a nitwit prone to malapropisms and exuberantly embodied by Andrew McGiunn and costumed by Frances Kenny in an aptly absurd mustard-colored suit.

The role of Feste, Olivia's trenchant house jester and rueful analyst of human folly, is dispatched with expected eloquence by nimble David Pichette. Wearing slinky black velvet, Mari Nelson is a glamorous Maria, Olivia's lady in waiting.

Another attendant, Nick Garrison, got up like a punk step-dancer, snags laughs merely by walking — as does Brandon Whitehead, in a hilarious cameo as a doddering priest.

Though they're unnecessarily closeted and annoyingly miked in some scenes, the antics of the comic crew best the play's parallel plot: the amorous adventures of young Viola (Christine Marie Brown), a shipwrecked twin who washes up on the isle of Illyria near a rugged promontory and the sharply angled carcass of a wooden freighter.

This landscape is designer Michael Pavelka's sole setting. And if it appears awfully artsy-fartsy at first, it gets a lot more interesting as Esbjornson and his actors have fun with it, and Scott Zielinski lights it in many shades.

Casebier's Olivia, an Audrey Hepburn look-alike in a purple gown worthy of Balenciaga, is largely ornamental, and her gender-confused crush on Brown's Viola lightly amusing.

Not so the shrill Orsino of Barzin Akhavan, who is off-putting in early scenes, and later registers barely a tingle of sexual chemistry with the cross-dressing Viola during the odd courtship.

How gladdening, then, that the servants and misfits prevail.

Ruddy-faced and colorfully upholstered, Leggett departs from the stumbling-drunk caricature of many a Sir Toby. Instead, with a comedic restraint that pays big laugh dividends, he makes the man a crack-shot wit who hasn't seen a sober day in years, and who covers his own wreckage with killer mockery — most acutely and cruelly, in the case of Olivia's pompous servant Malvolio (terrific Frank X).

When going on a late night bender, this Sir Toby of course sings the blues (one of the show's many nifty musical touches). And when the comely maid Maria takes him to her heart, in his courtly kiss and grateful glance, you feel how glad he is to be rescued from himself. And how glad we are to have met the old boy, warts and all.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com