Globe revisits a hero for the ages with Ken Ludwig comedy 'Robin Hood!'

By James Herbert for
The San Diego Union Tribune

There will be fights. There will be tights. (After a fashion.)“Robin Hood!,” the world-premiere comedy that Ken Ludwig is about to unveil at the Old Globe, maybe a fresh reconception of the centuries-old legend about a brave hero’s adventures in economic redistribution.

But Ludwig — the prolific playwright whose works have hit Broadway six times — says his take on the story will stay true to much of what audiences know and love about Robin Hood.

And more than that, he says, the play is meant to honor the qualities that he believes help explain the saga’s endurance.

“I want to portray the myth in what I think is its greatest form, which is its optimism and its real sense of working together to accomplish something, and to do the right thing,” Ludwig says.

“(Robin Hood) is a real hero in that sense — he's not a neurotic hero, and he's not doing it for any personal gain.

That “maybe deeply out of fashion” in an age of flawed antiheroes, Ludwig acknowledges. “But that's something I can’t worry about. I’ve gotta write what I believe. I’ve gotta write what's in my heart. What’s in my heart is that we can emulate these people.“

And that by emulating people who really have goals and a true heart, you can take a step forward, and push the ball forward in terms of our lives and our civilization.”

This being Robin Hood, of course, there will be swordfights.

“There will be some real one-on-one confrontations,” Ludwig says of the eight-actor production, directed by the Broadway veteran and Globe returnee Jessica Stone (of “Arms and the Man,” “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”).

“There's going to be a lot of physicality to this. But also a lot of moments when you dig into the personal stories of these people.”The overall vibe, he adds, is “hyper-real,” on the level of myth. That, says Ludwig, explains the title’s exclamation point.

Having Ludwig back in San Diego is its own kind of exclamation point for the Globe, which commissioned “Robin Hood!”Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein calls the two-time Tony Award nominee (for the hit farce “Lend Me a Tenor” and the musical “Crazy For You”) “arguably the leading comic dramatist in the American theater.

”Ludwig was last here two years ago with another Globe world premiere, “Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” his comic spin on the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle classic.

That show set a sales record for the Globe’s arena-style second space that dated back to when it was still the Cassius Carter Centre Stage. (The venue was rebuilt as the White Theatre about seven years ago.)

It takes nothing away from Ludwig’s achievement that the record was subsequently eclipsed by 2016’s “Meteor Shower,” a play by another writer of some comic renown — Steve Martin. (“Damn him!,” Ludwig says with a laugh. “I never even heard of the guy, and he steals my record.”)

Director Stone, who had a distinguished Broadway and film acting career before shifting into directing, has cast relative newcomer (and Yale School of Drama grad) Daniel Reece in the title role of the gallant outlaw who steals from the rich to give to the poor.

Reece is joined by Michael Boatman (of Broadway’s “Master Harold … and the Boys”) as Prince John, Kevin Cahoon (the Globe’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost”) as the Sheriff of Nottingham; Manoel Felciano (the Globe’s “Twelfth Night,” Broadway’s “Amélie”) as Sir Guy of Gisbourne; Meredith Garretson (Signature Theatre’s “Private Policy”) as Robin Hood’s romantic interest, Maid Marian; Andy Grotelueschen (just seen at the Globe in Fiasco Theatre’s “The Imaginary Invalid”) as Friar Tuck; Suzelle Palacios (of the Old Globe/University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program) as Doerwynn; and Paul Whitty (“Amélie” and “Once” on Broadway) as Little John.

The production represents a welcome return for another top theater artist: Costume designer Gregg Barnes, a San Diego native and two-time Tony winner (for “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “Follies”).“His drawings are spectacular,” says Ludwig, chatting before he’d had a chance to see Barnes’ finished costumes. “They reflect really the way I was hoping Robin Hood would be portrayed.”

And yes, “there probably will be a few pairs of tights running around,” Ludwig adds. (That common stylistic trope in retellings of the story was spoofed in the 1993 movie “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.”)

Ludwig, a Harvard Law School grad who worked as an associate in a law firm before deciding to devote his life to the theater, says he started thinking about the Robin Hood legend as a play some 10 years ago.

“I love the adventure, I love the story, I love that he’s a real hero,” says Ludwig, who was just announced as the winner of a Sustained Excellence in American Theatre award from the Samuel French publishing and licensing organization.

“And as I started taking notes on all my books — and I have a pretty big Robin Hood library — I started seeing that it's got to be more than that. That would be fine if it were a children's story. But there had to be more.”

That “more” developed into a sincere focus on the “kind of person who shows compassion for those who are less fortunate than he is, and where there’s a society that is overtaxed and can't make ends meet. And is facing certain political realities that they have trouble dealing with.“

They live a rough life of abuse. They're dismissed as an underclass. And somebody comes along and in his own personal journey transforms himself, and comes to face to face with this, and says, ‘This can't be. This is just not right. On a personal, moral level, this has got to stop.’

“I don’t want to be overly political about it. It’s there in the history of our country, in terms of race relations, in terms of prejudice, in terms of lots of things. The fact that right now we're going through another turbulent time that reflects the same kinds of problems is no coincidence.

“But I’m not out to preach. This is not an anti-Trump polemic. This is quite seriously about an individual who undergoes a moral crisis and starts to see the world differently, and (see) that the world is only going to survive if we show real compassion.

“And start realizing that we all have to take care of each other.”