READ Our profile of new producing artistic director Philip Sneed. READ Our collection of anecdotes from 50 years of stars who have appeared on Colorado Shakespeare Festival stages, including Annette Bening, Jimmy Smits, Val Kilmer, Michael Moriarty, Barry Corbin, Karen Grassle, Ted Lange and John Carroll Lynch. LISTEN to more from Jimmy Smits' interview with John Moore, including an anecdote on how, as Othello, he navigated the dark and circuitous walkways under Hellems Hall.
READ Sneed announces next year's titles, including a Woody Guthrie musical -- and "Henry VIII." To quote poor Hermia, "I understand not what you mean by this!" The Colorado Shakespeare Festival opened its 50th season Saturday with "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but it would take a magic potion to decipher what was going on.
Too much meaning should not be placed in this quizzical first offering under new artistic director Philip Sneed, for director Gavin Cameron-Webb's festival ties go back decades. But neither can much meaning be gleaned from a staging when we're not even sure where we are. Days later, I had found no one with a cogent grip on the concept.
Cameron-Webb has made Shakespeare's most accessible play dense. He's taken a story equal parts drama, romance and comedy and made it strictly a comedy about ..
. theater, of all things. Not the true nature of love.
Not the manipulation of power. Acting - an artifice that severs the play from its emotional depth. But as a comedy, "Bottom's up!
" because this stage belongs to a great Stephen Weitz as Bottom and his hilarious band of amateur thespians, who nearly manage to make you forgive and forget all that precedes an ingenious final act. Hint: best use of a bagel ever. But where is this stage?
Why is there no clarity of character, setting or storytelling? This is the tale of the quarreling fairy King who enlists mischievous sprite Puck to use a potion that makes his wife fall in love with an ass. Then he orders it be used on four mismatched young lovers in the forest, to set the lineup straight.
Five years ago, a straightforward CSF staging called the nature of love into question: Is this happy ending real if it has been manifested by a potion? Is that not a love untrue? Earlier Saturday, I was getting all mushy in my basement watching the great BBC series "Shakespeare Re-Told," which makes it abundantly clear "Dream" is not about what happens when your eyes are closed - it's about having them opened for the first time.
It's about seeing what's already true, and right in front of you. It's about welcoming real love into your life, whether you've been drugged or not. Hours later, I had no clue.
I never even got my bearings straight. Best guess: We're in a theater. Everyone's an actor.
Where and when? I dunno. But our actors are presenting "Midsummer" in the performance style of Victorian England.
But "Midsummer" is partly set in Greece, so the actors play actors in an Athenian amateur acting troupe. If any of that turns out to be anywhere near true, this is all far more dense than it need be. A play in a play in a play - on a stage within a stage?
I can't see the forest through the trees. Speaking of the forest, who takes a play set in a magical woods and presents it in the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre (a forest!), then moves the setting inside a theater?
Hermia is a bully. Helena is a shrew. Demetrius is nasty.
Lysander is dull. There are more questions: Why take a play about the essence of love, the most intrinsic of human emotions, and make it about acting love? Ah, you might say, but isn't any usual performance of "Midsummer" actors feigning love?
True. But it's the actor's job to make you think it's real, so that you might feel something real in return. Here the goal is the opposite.
So if this is a play about actors acting, where are all the actors? The players playing Theseus and Hippolyta double as Oberon and Titania. Fairies and pixies are turned into red-dot, power-point special effects.
John Plumpis' Puck, merry wanderer of the night, is utterly enjoyable. READ Our profile of new producing artistic director Philip Sneed.
News RSS