Dream On

It was a magical Friday night to attend a performance of Midsummer's Night Dream at High Park, with a rare blue moon shining through the trees. The outdoor stage was at the bottom of a hill with grassy seats rising in tiers. The show was full with standing room only . The actors' voices carried clearly from the stage. The whole set-up reminded me of ancient Athenian stages given the play's setting.

But this interpretation of the play was set in present day. Theseus and Hippolyta was a royal celebrity couple; their counterpart Oberon and Titania resembled more a bohemian hippie pairing; and Demetrius, Helena, Lysander, and Hermia were respectively an uptight businessman, a fitness freak, a partying meat-head, and a red-headed naif. Even the comedy players came from the modern world including Nick Bottom as a glad-handing real estate agent.

Some of the staging was inspired. Actors walked, climbed, and even leapt through various openings in the hedges that formed the backdrop. Giant blooms unfurled in the forest. The fairies attending Bottom as Ass were his fellow players enchanted by Puck to speak with (pre-recorded) children's voices.

The acting was good overall but disappointing in one respect. Most of the principals could not consistently speak their lines in a modern natural cadence except for Egeus. Shakespeare's poetical iambic pentameters often reduced their speech to a quizzical sing-song. This dissonance was especially jarring with a thoroughly modern character like the Jersey Shore-esque Lysander.

The comedy players are always good for a laugh with their hammy acting and low-brow talk. But there were also laughter because the actors added winking sexual innuendo to some of their lines and situations. Who knew that Demetrius and Helena might harbor latent S&M leanings!

The play itself is not much more than a rom-com and this version emphasized that fact. A fun evening but not quite as magical as that blue moon.