SOURCE: Gerard, Jeremy. Review of All's Well That Ends Well. Variety 352, no. 2 (23 August 1993): 23.

In the following review, Gerard assesses the New York Shakespeare Festival production of All's Well That Ends Well directed by Richard Jones. Gerard comments that the production emphasized the play's troubling and ambiguous nature while retaining the play's comic features.

Death silently stalks the players in Richard Jones' mesmerizing production of “All's Well That Ends Well” in Central Park. But like the cruel, cynical world of this “problem play” of Shakespeare's, this Death boasts a comic gloss, being impersonated by a little boy in a Halloween skeleton costume. Sometimes he slips, unnoticed, scythe in hand, into courtly processions at Rousillon and Paris; sometimes he peers down at the action from a perch in a row of spectators above and behind the proceedings.

For all that he represents, this pint-size portent is hard to take too...