To Be or Not To Be

From left to right: Evelyn Ewald as Elizabeth Condell, Madison Nowak as Alice, and Diane Kallas as Rebecca Heminges in The Book of Will at Lake Country Playhouse. Photo credit: Mark Frohna.

A review of The Book of Will

by Kennedy Freiberg, age 12

The Book of Will is a comedy about William Shakespeare’s friends fighting to get all of his plays published in a book. Though there are a lot of funny moments, this show also has very emotional scenes. In all of these scenes, the actors at Lake Country Playhouse understood the assignment, and I genuinely felt the emotion that was being portrayed because of how well they performed.

I would like to shout out Eric Rorholm for the set design. I liked how the set extended into the audience. There were Shakespeare quotes surrounding the walls, a bar set for those scenes, and my favorite scenes were probably ones in the printing office because of the amount of detail put into it. Overall the whole set made me feel like I was in the story.

Of course the actors did amazing also. The whole cast was incredible, but I personally really enjoyed Madison Nowak as Alice. She was able to capture the emotion of having a sick parent (I swear I saw tears), but was still able to get me to laugh in the lighthearted scenes. 

I do have one note that I would like to say, which is that if the actors made a mistake, I could tell by their face. They hid it well enough that people that have never seen a show before or someone who isn’t an actor couldn’t tell, but as someone who has been in multiple plays and seen a lot of shows, I could tell.

In conclusion, I truly enjoyed this production of The Book of Will! I would recommend this show more to people that are really into Shakespeare, because I didn’t really understand most of the references.

Catch more shows like this at Lake Country Playhouse!