All Onset’s a stage: Shakespeare returns to the park
Celia, played by Susanna Creel, shares a scene with Ray Bishop’s Rosalind. Photos by Liam Mayo
Jack Martin, playing Jacques, delivered a stirring rendition of “All the world’s a stage.”
Ray Bishop, playing Rosalind, shares a scene with the love-struck Orlando, played by Tim Moynihan. 
The audience looks on from the seats around the Onset Bandshell.
Celia, played by Susanna Creel, shares a scene with Ray Bishop’s Rosalind. Photos by Liam Mayo
Jack Martin, playing Jacques, delivered a stirring rendition of “All the world’s a stage.”
Ray Bishop, playing Rosalind, shares a scene with the love-struck Orlando, played by Tim Moynihan.
The audience looks on from the seats around the Onset Bandshell.
As noble players acted on the stage, a gentle breeze of Onset wafted through, and brought with it the sound of horns and song, and brilliant clouds above all clear to view.
This was Shakespeare Under the Stars, a program that marked the Bard’s return to Onset on Monday, July 29.
That evening, Cape Cod Community College Performing Arts put on the over-four-hundred-year-old comedy “As You Like It,” a play of “love, laughter and mistaken identities,” according to the program.
There was plenty of laughter from the audience, who sat in rows around the Onset Bandshell. A wrestling match early in the play brought out shouts and gasps from the eager crowd; by the end, each actor’s entrance and exit was met with a smattering of applause.
The performers thrilled audiences, with college student Jack Martin delivering a standout rendition of the Bard’s famous speech, “All the world’s a stage.”
And as the actors exited the play, their parting words brought forth the close of day.
Director Jess Wilson said this was her first time holding a Shakespeare production in Onset since 2019 when the pandemic put a stop to the Midsummer Shakespeare performances which Wilson had co-founded around a decade earlier.
“I absolutely love outdoors Shakespeare,” Wilson said, adding that it’s a low stakes, free way of getting people introduced to his works performed in live theater.
Lovers of the art form — or those wanting to watch it for the first time — can catch the play’s second occurrence on Monday, August 5, starting at 6 p.m.
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