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.