A Midsummer Night's Screwball Comedy
As an early Christmas gift, my parents gave us tickets to the Folger Shakespeare Theater production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream". It was wholly unlike what I was expecting (whatever that was), and a lot of fun. The director's alleged inspiration was seeing a really bad performance of AMSND in the middle of a Busby Berkeley film festival, and realizing that Gable and Lombard (or Nick and Nora Charles) were a much more convincing Oberon and Titania than any of the vanilla faery interpretations he'd ever seen. So he staged the whole play as '30s high society with absurd musical interludes -- and it works!
Some details:
1. The text was straight Shakespeare, with no attempt to 'modernize' except for a few (ad lib?) one-liners.
2. The 'business' was slapstick, but deliberately patterned (IMHO) on animated cartoons. Think Bugs Bunny, not Three Stooges. This is important, for reasons I'll get back to below.
3. There were many musical interludes, in which the actors on stage would sing and dance (lip-synched) to '30s recordings. In most cases, these were presented as the fairies compelling the mortals to perform as 'puppets' for the fairies' own amusement -- but the song lyrics were on-topic for the current situation. I was reminded of the PBS production "The Singing Detective", in some ways -- surreal musical numbers inserted into unrelated scenes. (A couple of the actors were extremely good at portraying "mortal who suddenly finds him/herself singing and dancing with no control, and after fighting it for a few moments gives in and enjoys performing".)
4. The roles in the modern setting were rendered as wealthy noble couple-to-be (Theseus and Hippolyta -> Oberon and Titania), their personal secretary (Philostrate -> Puck), their butler (Egeus), and other servants. I don't know enough about how the play is usually done to say whether this mapping from Theseus/Hippolyta/Philostrate to Oberon/Titania/Puck is standard or novel, but it certainly worked well.
Now, the genius of it...
If you read AMSND, you can see how it would be a bitch to make it immersive for a modern audience. The Athenians are unreal and remote, the fairies are stupid and silly, the servants and their lowbrow are out of fashion, the physical action is preposterous, etc. The genius is that the director (Joe Banno) realized that there *are* immersive contexts for modern audiences in which those things are not a problem -- namely, screwball movie comedy, musicals, and cartoons. We don't bat an eye at Kate Hepburn wandering the woods looking for her leopard by singing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", nor at impromptu production numbers in the middle of "Phantom of the Opera" or "Sweeney Todd", nor at Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair before falling (one body segment at a time) to the canyon floor thousands of feet below -- then getting up again.
So Banno turned the main plot of AMSND into a '30s screwball movie comedy, and transformed the (unacceptable) 'straight' depiction of the Seelie Court into Busby Berkeley production numbers and Bugs Bunny fight scenes. And, son of a gun, it worked beautifully. Lysander in Argyle sweater and greased hair; Demetrius in lounge-lizard shoes, yellow baggy pants, and wide belt; Hermia the petite ingenue and Helena the gangly bookworm; Egeus the gentleman's gentleman (tapdancing creditably under the spell of the fairies)... It all works. It's even presented as a film -- the household (all upset over the lovers' troubles) are gathered to watch a movie to lighten the mood. The projector starts to roll, the lighting flickers as if a film were showing... and we're with Oberon and Puck.
As for the play within the play... well. I'll just say that the complete ham who played Bottom had the entire cast helpless with laughter as 'Pyramis' took 10 minutes to stab himself to death with a potato-masher.
And the audience lost it completely on:
BOTTOM: Will it please you see the Epilogue...?
ALL: No!!!
All in all, an excellent and very entertaining show. I can see why it was held over, and I'm sorry it closes so soon.
Some details:
1. The text was straight Shakespeare, with no attempt to 'modernize' except for a few (ad lib?) one-liners.
2. The 'business' was slapstick, but deliberately patterned (IMHO) on animated cartoons. Think Bugs Bunny, not Three Stooges. This is important, for reasons I'll get back to below.
3. There were many musical interludes, in which the actors on stage would sing and dance (lip-synched) to '30s recordings. In most cases, these were presented as the fairies compelling the mortals to perform as 'puppets' for the fairies' own amusement -- but the song lyrics were on-topic for the current situation. I was reminded of the PBS production "The Singing Detective", in some ways -- surreal musical numbers inserted into unrelated scenes. (A couple of the actors were extremely good at portraying "mortal who suddenly finds him/herself singing and dancing with no control, and after fighting it for a few moments gives in and enjoys performing".)
4. The roles in the modern setting were rendered as wealthy noble couple-to-be (Theseus and Hippolyta -> Oberon and Titania), their personal secretary (Philostrate -> Puck), their butler (Egeus), and other servants. I don't know enough about how the play is usually done to say whether this mapping from Theseus/Hippolyta/Philostrate to Oberon/Titania/Puck is standard or novel, but it certainly worked well.
Now, the genius of it...
If you read AMSND, you can see how it would be a bitch to make it immersive for a modern audience. The Athenians are unreal and remote, the fairies are stupid and silly, the servants and their lowbrow are out of fashion, the physical action is preposterous, etc. The genius is that the director (Joe Banno) realized that there *are* immersive contexts for modern audiences in which those things are not a problem -- namely, screwball movie comedy, musicals, and cartoons. We don't bat an eye at Kate Hepburn wandering the woods looking for her leopard by singing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", nor at impromptu production numbers in the middle of "Phantom of the Opera" or "Sweeney Todd", nor at Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair before falling (one body segment at a time) to the canyon floor thousands of feet below -- then getting up again.
So Banno turned the main plot of AMSND into a '30s screwball movie comedy, and transformed the (unacceptable) 'straight' depiction of the Seelie Court into Busby Berkeley production numbers and Bugs Bunny fight scenes. And, son of a gun, it worked beautifully. Lysander in Argyle sweater and greased hair; Demetrius in lounge-lizard shoes, yellow baggy pants, and wide belt; Hermia the petite ingenue and Helena the gangly bookworm; Egeus the gentleman's gentleman (tapdancing creditably under the spell of the fairies)... It all works. It's even presented as a film -- the household (all upset over the lovers' troubles) are gathered to watch a movie to lighten the mood. The projector starts to roll, the lighting flickers as if a film were showing... and we're with Oberon and Puck.
As for the play within the play... well. I'll just say that the complete ham who played Bottom had the entire cast helpless with laughter as 'Pyramis' took 10 minutes to stab himself to death with a potato-masher.
And the audience lost it completely on:
BOTTOM: Will it please you see the Epilogue...?
ALL: No!!!
All in all, an excellent and very entertaining show. I can see why it was held over, and I'm sorry it closes so soon.