Hollywood Meets the Bard For a Roaring Good Time

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Director Joe Banno's seductively goofy "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Folger Theatre grafts Shakespeare's romantic fantasy onto the dream worlds of 1930s Hollywood musicals. It's a show that may not inspire rereadings of the Bard, but it'll provoke intrigued clicks on the Netflix archive.

How, for instance, does Banno's softly silly staging of "The Girl at the Ironing Board" compare with Busby Berkeley's treatment of it in the 1934 musical extravaganza "Dames"? And "Let Yourself Go," lip-synced by Deborah Hazlett as fairy queen Titania just before intermission -- wasn't that done by Ginger Rogers in "Follow the Fleet"?

The show doesn't run strictly on Tinseltown references, though the famous MGM lion actually roars once in Neil McFadden's impish sound design. And yes, the actors here practice the ungentle art of lip-syncing. Shakespeare's scene structure and language are essentially intact, but as Banno sets things up, music is key to the magic.

Plot refresher: As the generally aggravated court of Theseus and Hippolyta merges into the fairy world, the chief irritant is the thwarted love of young Lysander and fair Hermia. They want to wed over the objections of Hermia's father, Egeus. He wants Hermia to marry Demetrius, who is loved by the lonely Helena. With the help of mischievous fairies, things sort themselves out in the woods.

Banno and McFadden quietly limn the early scenes with the kind of jaunty orchestral toot-toot-toot that frequently underscored the dialogue in 1930s musical comedies. When Theseus requests a movie for the evening's entertainment, the songs waltz into the spotlight.

Everything transforms: Philostrate, Theseus's assistant, becomes the sprightly Puck, lip-syncing a song while a gigantic bed by set designer Erhard Rom eases into view. Much of what follows is performed in costume designer Kate Turner-Walker's silk pajamas around a gigantic leather bed; it's like something out of a Hugh Hefner fever dream.

The borrowed soundtrack is one of the trade-offs in this production. The lip-syncing itself takes a bit of adjustment. Yes, it's conspicuous, as it was in many of the films Banno so lovingly apes. But though this isn't nearly as ungainly as Kenneth Branagh's MGM-style movie of "Love's Labor's Lost" a few years ago, it's still peculiar to watch highly trained actors interrupt the precision linguistics of Shakespeare for imprecise pantomiming to carefree tunes.

The numbers themselves, choreographed by Peter Dimuro, often have an oddball charm, not least because he and Banno never settle for anything obvious. Yet these moments never quite send you over the moon a la the high camp of John Epperson's robust, high-heeled Lypsinka act. Here, the effect is often appealing but sometimes worryingly fragile. The other trade-off is the business of dialogue overwhelmed in the boisterous reach for laughs. It's particularly noticeable as Briel Banks's Hermia and Stephanie Burden's Helena bicker while Lysander (Marcus Kyd) and Demetrius (Tim Getman) brawl. Even Kate Eastwood Norris, who is highly skilled at making Shakespearean phrases sing, scores mainly between the lines with double-takes and sputters as Puck.

Still, there is laughter enough as the production overflows with kissing and slapping, and as usual Banno has gathered a strong, colorful cast. John Lescault preens plausibly as a John Barrymore-like Theseus, and he and Deborah Hazlett bring grave (if not smoldering) sex appeal to both their royal couplings, doubling as Theseus-Hipployta and the fairy rulers Oberon and Titania.

Ralph Cosham doesn't have to double; he gets two parts in one. Banno combines the roles of Egeus, Hermia's aggrieved father (here a white-gloved servant to Theseus), and Snout, who plays the wall in the amateurish "Pyramus and Thisbe" that the "rude mechanicals" perform for the court. The result is Egeus Snout, a character Cosham hilariously makes as dry and bitter as Malvolio in "Twelfth Night."

That "Pyramus" is occasionally priceless, especially with David Marks effortlessly hamming things up as the vainglorious Bottom, earlier turned into a donkey (rascally fairies again). The show by and large is a lark. And if it doesn't always fly, it is somehow irresistible, right down to the death scene featuring a potato masher. That's entertainment.