‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ shines with Cole Porter’s songs
Approached about writing a Shakespeare-based musical, Cole Porter initially balked, worried that the Bard would be too highbrow for his form of musical comedy. After he changed his mind, he wrote “Kiss Me Kate,” his greatest score (sorry, “Anything Goes” fans).
Off the Wall Theatre’s Dale Gutzman takes this idea and runs with it in a smartly conceived, just-opened production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that includes 11 Porter songs.
It’s as good a coupling as any of those taking place within a play Gutzman suggests is Shakespeare’s most erotic.
Porter’s mercurial shifts between major and minor – and his consistently sounded theme that love is intoxicating as well as unstable and unsure – fits a play written in the same year as “Romeo and Juliet.” “Midsummer” isn’t just a frisky frolic in the woods. It’s also an unsettling dream revealing our darkest impulses and deepest fears about sex, love and death.
One sees this most clearly here through the four young lovers (Jake Konrath, Liz Mistele, Alicia Rice and Max Williamson), who move beyond some early overacting to one of the most memorable pillow fights I’ve seen, aided and abetted by a mischievous Puck (David Flores).
All of them are blind to what and even who they desire (Gutzman has great fun with this, particularly with Rice). The boys’ toxic brew of anger and lust creeps uncomfortably close to assault. And the great mid-play melee between this foursome – much more violent and physically punishing here than one usually sees – takes comedy to the brink of madness.
Even when they come to their senses while singing one of three songs Gutzman has incorporated from Porter’s erotic score to “Out of This World,” their choreography suggests they’re still not sure whether they’re truly with the one they love or just learning to love the one they’re with.
A similar uncertainty afflicts Laura Monagle’s Hippolyta, who’ll move from being angrily bound and gagged in the bed of a victorious Theseus (Ben George) toward love – partly through an ingenious piece of stage business suggesting the warlike Theseus has the soul of a poet.
But even after she awakens into her role as Theseus’ trophy wife, Monagle’s Hippolyta also remembers her erotic dream as Titania, making love to a supremely well-endowed donkey (Jeremy C. Welter as Bottom). Monagle blurs the lines between Hippolyta’s waking and sleeping selves, giving both more texture – and uncertainty.
It’s Bottom and his fellow mechanicals who do most to rewrite this potential tragedy as a comedy, and Gutzman’s staging of their play within a play is ingenious. It’s filled with great sight gags and priceless costumes as well as backstage jokes involving the Off the Wall regulars in this motley crew – each of them helping transform a night mysterious into a joy delirious.