Several hundred amazingly respectful school kids attended the matinee I saw of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and seemed to really enjoy it, despite the wrongheaded production. Stratford's eye-popping, elaborate stagings, performed by some of the world's best-trained, most gifted classical actors in these state-of-the-art theaters are likely to be the best you will see, even when they're ill-conceived. So the kids were right to feel well entertained.
But this Dream makes little sense. The play is set in a fantasy world, so it can look like any place or period. But why would director Leon Rubin want it to look like 20th-century proletariat visiting a tropical jungle full of painted Mardi Gras celebrants? Why, when Nick Bottom is transformed into an ass, does he look like one of the natives draped with fronds of dried leaves, his donkey-head not comic but artsy, like an open, woven sculpture?
Gorgeously lit by Michael J. Whitfield, John Pennoyer's designs are exotic and spectacular but do not present a magic fairy world or an aristocratic court of any kind. And Bruce Gaston's music is a loud intrusion unrelated in style or period to what is happening onstage. Is there a through line for the mishmash of acting styles? Why do some of the fairies perform trapeze acts? To create magic from beautiful movement, director Max Reinhardt flew the fairies on wires and had beautifully choreographed dancers onstage. Peter Brooks substituted actors' magic for stage magic, using trapezes and unadorned practice clothes. But all the acrobatics thrillingly served a dramatic purpose. Rubin's weird-looking creatures just bob up and down on trapezes overhead pointlessly. Rubin has Donna Feore choreograph dancers as if in some scary tribal ritual.
When handsome Jonathan Goad looks merely vulgar as Oberon, king of the fairy world, and lovely Dana Green seems downright slutty as Titania, his queen, something is amiss. Nicholas Van Burek, always notably excellent at Stratford, is somehow ordinary and hardly interesting as Puck. And Thom Marriott ought to sue for being made to look like a bad amateur actor playing one as Bottom.
