Musical flair colours Shakespeare fare
Ahmed Moneka usually plays Puck in director D. Jeremy Smith’s production of A (musical) Midsummer Night's Dream.
A (musical) Midsummer Night’s Dream (out of 4) Written by William Shakespeare. Adapted by Kevin Fox, Tom Lillington and D. Jeremy Smith. Directed by D. Jeremy Smith. Tuesday at Guild Park, 201 Guildwood Parkway, Toronto, and until Aug. 18 at locations across Ontario. driftwoodtheatre.com
In his director’s note for Driftwood Theatre’s 25th anniversary Bard’s Bus Tour, D. Jeremy Smith explains that the whole enterprise began when, during a summer in the middle of his undergraduate degree, he was struck with the desire to play the trickster fairy Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Smith’s story came full circle Friday night in Toronto’s Withrow Park when he stepped back into Puck’s shoes (or goggles, in this case) when the partner of regular actor Ahmed Moneka went into labour.
Sometimes life and art find serendipitous connections, as in Smith’s emergency return to the stage (his first time in 15 years, he said after the performance), which only makes efforts to give this production a 2019 sensibility feel forced and overreaching.
Driftwood has returned to its version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the anniversary bus tour — the annual tour brings a modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play to parks across Ontario — adding musical storytelling to the famous tale of four young lovers lost in the woods amidst a troupe of amateur actors and spiteful fairies with magic flowers.
With Tom Lillington’s music direction, supporting vocals from Alison Beckwith and a young cast (mostly) fresh from musical theatre programs, A (musical) Midsummer Night’s Dream delivers slick production values for a show designed to be packed into a van and unloaded for one-night-only tour stops across the province.
The music frequently adds the desired punch to drive home a mood or a moment, like the lullabies from Titania (Siobhan Richardson) and her fairy aides, or Lysander’s (Nathaniel Hanula-James) awakening to his magic-induced obsession with Helena (Kelsi James), or the battle of Helena and Hermia (Marissa Orjalo), believing her friend has wooed away her betrothed.
This version of the play prioritizes the audience’s sympathies for Nick Bottome by changing him from a weaver into an unemployed autoworker. Driftwood co-founder Steven Burley’s rock ’n’ roll vibes are put to good use in the role, the start of his new life as an actor, as an overconfident but sympathetic working-class hero.
But turning Shakespeare’s most famous comedy into a musical takes more than intricate compositions and a few notable performances. Transposing the play to this genre demands that songs be earned by substantial character motivation. Throughout the show, songs arise out of necessity instead of desire, sometimes overloading the text with backgrounds vocals and complex melodies.
The music gives Shakespeare’s text that extra flair that is a Driftwood signature, but Smith goes further with a kind of commentary on our social-media, phone-obsessed culture.
Co-mayors Hippolyta (Richardson) and Theseus (James Dallas Smith) play Mortal Kombat on their phones instead of doing city work, and Lysander and Hermia trade flirtations via their phone cameras instead of each other. It gets old and leads to some inexplicable shifts in attitude and buy-in from the audience (are we supposed to be rooting for this love connection or wishing for their romance to be exposed as a sham?). It feels shoehorned in as a commentary on our current culture when nothing else feels pulled from 2019 — not even Hippolyta’s pink sequined shirt-dress or the campiness of the music.
With major anniversaries, the desire to make connections between the past and present is understandable, but there’s also power in returning to a past favourite and letting new audiences draw their own parallels to their lives.