‘As You Like It’ meets the Beatles in its Shakespeare Theatre show

Shakespeare and the Beatles? In theater director Daryl Cloran’s “As You Like It,” the two, pardon the pun, come together. He has incorporated about two dozen Fab Four standards into his staging of Shakespeare’s popular comedy, running at Shakespeare Theatre Company from Dec. 2 to Jan. 14.

With actor-musicians performing the tunes live, this “As You Like It” has proved a hit since premiering in 2018 at Bard on the Beach festival in Vancouver. The production may not have been here, there and everywhere, but it has certainly traveled around Canada and to Chicago and Milwaukee. The Shakespeare/Beatles matchup is no mere gimmick, Cloran says, as the music and text truly align. When he started work on the production, he remembers, “it really felt, as I went through, that these songs were written for this play.”