New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘REWIRED’ MUSICAL
FUSE THEATRE PUTS MODERN COVID TWIST ON SHAKESPEARE
When the pandemic shut down FUSE Theatre of CT’s production of “The Lion King, Jr.” last year, it emboldened Lara Morton, the Madison-based group’s vice-president and director, to assemble a shutter-proof production for this year.
The result is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream — The Rewired Musical,” a multimedia platform production streaming May 21 through June 4.
Morton adapted Shakespeare’s farcical rom-com with Noah Golden, who applied his skills as a video producer/ editor at Yale School of Medicine to become the production designer and editor of the production.
Both Morton and Golden said that Shakespeare’s venerable, mystical story remains intact. It follows two couples (Lysander and Hermia and Demetrius and Helena) who flee their homes to be with their true loves in a magical forest, for some unexpected midsummer madness wrought by other-worldly Oberon, Titania, Puck and a bevy of fairies.
Among the bewitched is Bottom, one of the Rude Mechanicals rehearsing their play intended to entertain nearby wedding guests.
According to Morton, Golden — who also plays Egeus in the production — suggested that “rather than pretend we’re not doing a play on Zoom, let’s use Zoom and other video platforms to tell the story. Let’s use them to our advantage.”
The reason it’s called “re-wired,” Golden said, is that “that our version takes place in the summer of 2020. Our characters are, like everybody else, stuck at home, stuck in quarantine, and they communicate the way we all communicate in this time, which is on Facetime calls and Zoom calls.”
As Golden explained the concept, the story’s four young lovers, denied inperson courtships, flirt on social media until they reach the woods.
“Helena makes YouTube videos and goes on Instagram Live,” Golden said. “One of our characters has a scene that takes place on Twitch stream. So, it’s just shifting the text into this kind of a modern realm.”
Necessity was indeed the mother of the FUSE team’s concept, as Golden explained.
“I had seen a lot of Zoom plays and readings, which were sort of people putting on a costume, putting on a digital background, and going on Zoom. There’s nothing wrong with that at all! Any way you can produce (a play) and express yourself is great! It just wasn’t something that is inherently exciting to us,” he said.
“So, the question to me was how can we use these limitations as our strength?” Golden said. “Instead of running from this and putting on a digital background of woods, pretending we’re in the woods, how can we use this to our advantage?
Golden said that The Mechanicals are “not a very talented group,” and they struggle with the staging of their brief rendition of the Pyramus and Thisbe fable as we watch them rehearse and, finally, stumble through their story before the wedding guests.
Their show, Golden said, “is sort of a parody of bad Zoom theater. It has the Green Screen, which is not working, and the internet’s down, and someone is muted-all those kinds of things that we have grown to know over the past year.”
FUSE’s ruse puts the Fairies entirely in the digital world, Golden said, as the personification of our computers and our digital lives.
“They live inside our devices and control our devices. That’s how they control the lives of the (human) characters,” he said. “Same story, just giving it a new skin.”
Conceiving the highly physical, farcical scene in the forest with the four callow lovers and the Fairies “was, by far, the hardest part of adapting the show,” Golden said.
“When (the four lovers) talk about running away, they depart for Lysander’s rich aunt living outside of Athens, yet never quite reach the house,” he said. “In our production, it’s a summer cabin they call ‘The Wood.’ That’s one of our few scenes shot on location.”
Composer Lydia Arachne said that, while composing the 10 songs for the production peopled with teen performers, she “wanted to write music that would introduce them to a few, like, more complex concepts in music theory, so that I wasn’t just writing music to this for the sake of writing music to it,” said Arachne, who lists Paul Simon, Steely Dan, and prog-rock bands Yes and Genesis among her influences (“I imagine Peter Gabriel playing Oberon,” she said).
“There are a couple of songs written in the acoustic scale,” she said, “which is a non-standard scale that has been used in some of Bartok’s music and in some traditional Brazilian music.”
Morton, who described Arachne’s contribution as nothing short of “genius,” said that the composer’s “ability to craft a song using Shakespeare is, I think, the single most impressive thing about this project.”
To complete their high-tech concept, Morton and producer Elizabeth Santaus added April Chateauneuf (digital scenic designer) and Lyndsey Chance Simmons (choreography), as well as Jake Egan O’Hara and Nightwing Whitehead (costumes) to complete the design team.
“This production is the single, most collaborative thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said Morton. “There’s no divas in the group.”
For more information or tickets for the show, visit FuseTheatreCT.org.