The Logan Youth Shakespeare stages three of the Bard’s plays each year and invites youngsters aged 9 to 19 to perform.

LOGAN – Actors come in all shapes and sizes when Logan Youth Shakespeare players take the stage and that’s half the fun.

The Merry Wives of Windor is a farce about love, marriage, jealousy, revenge and wealth. In older hands, the show might be played with irony, sexual innuendo and sarcasm.

But the kids — aged 9 to 19 — gave it their all over the weekend and the result was pretty funny.

The play’s plot — what there is of it — is preposterous.

The old knight Sir John Falstaff — borrowed from the Bard’s Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 — is down on his luck, so he decides to seduce and blackmail two wealthy matrons, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford.

When informed of the plot, Master Ford flies into a rage. Chaos ensues, complicated by misunderstandings among the characters and outright deceptions. on the part of the mischievous wives.

Adult directors Jo Leary and Lisa Jacobson-Ward amusingly assign characters without much regard to age or gender, but it works.

Lizzy Belmont and Camilla Watkins (as Mistress Ford and Mistress Page respectively) are tall and willowy, towering over their husbands (Spencer Wilkinson and Pluto Susman) who are short and pudgy. You get the picture.

Delilah Thimmes is excellent as Sir Hugh Evans, a Welsh reverend who is courting Anne Page (Lauren Perry), who obviously prefers the company of Fenton (Max Lofland).

Falstaff is well played by Mini McGonagill, who is unrecognizable with a beard and in a fat suit.

Then there’s Eli Ashcroft who is hilarious in drag as Mistress Quickly. In Shakespeare’s day, female characters were played by young men, but Ashcroft is anything but feminine.

Somehow or other, these characters and others end up in the woods outside Windsor for the grand finale dressed as fairies.

After much ado, Falstaff is perplexed to learn that he has been made the butt of an extended gag and a couple of suitors for Anne’s hand are annoyed to discover that she ran away with Fenton during the confusion.

But All’s Well that Ends Well.

Wait a minute, that’s another show.

Logan Youth Shakespeare is a program of the Cache Valley Center for the Arts. The LYS stages three Shakespeare plays a year and invites youngsters aged 9 to 19 to perform.

CacheARTS is an independent non-profit group dedicated to the management of the Ellen Eccles Theatre, the Bullen Center and the Thatcher-Young Mansion.







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