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'All's Well That Ends Well” can feel as though Shakespeare wrote it in the throes of a spectacular hangover.

The play fairly winces and sighs at humans' moral shortcomings and base cravings. Characters are constantly being cut off or shushed, as if their prattlings might, anon, make the playwright's head blow up.

And there's a remarkably gimlet-eyed – cynical, even – sense of the pragmatic in matters of love and family: An aspiring wife trading medical care for a right to a husband, a dad signing over his unwilling son to seal the deal. The ends justify the means (as the title seems to suggest), and these are some mean means indeed.

But there's a cranky, almost subversive sense of humor, too, and in the Old Globe Theatre's staging of this “problem play,” director Darko Tresnjak's keen sense of tonal balance turns what could be an awkward wobble into a mostly graceful walk.

Continue reading this Union-Tribune article here.

This play, along with "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and " Romeo and Juliet," are all a part of the 2008 Shakespeare Festival and performed on a nightly rotation.

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