A Midsummer Night’s Dream

One of the major challenges for a director taking on a frequently produced Shakespeare play is to find new ideas to bring to it. Tina Landau’s got a million of ’em for her interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has alighted at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre before moving up north for a month-long run at the Paper Mill Playhouse on April 19.

Landau’s most successful notion is her use of the musical group GrooveLily, whose very name sounds like something the Bard might have dreamed up. At the beginning of the show, GrooveLily’s Brendan Milburn, Valerie Vigoda and Gene Lewin are asleep over their instruments on set designer Louisa Thompson’s black bandstand, three dreamers joined to the six already written into the text. As cartoon flowers suddenly surround them, they strike up their sinuous funk-band. The play becomes their dream, and they underscore the proceedings with serendipitous melodies, also supplying additional lyrics that would do Shakespeare himself proud. Later, they appear as three of the mechanicals presenting the lovably crude Pyramus-and-Thisbe court entertainment.

The director’s would-be inspirations hardly stop there as the confused lovers Hermia (Stacey Sargeant), Demetrius (Will Fowler), Lysander (James Martinez), and Helena (Brenda Withers) flee into those Freudian woods near Athens and come literally under the spell of Oberon (Jay Goede), who has got his own prank already underway for consort Titania (Ellen McLaughlin). The prank, pulled off by the mischief-making Puck (Guy Adkins), is a spell that causes Titania to become enamored of the hee-hawing donkey into which the rustic Bottom (Lea DeLaria) has been turned.

The visual and audio stimuli continue. Almost instantly after GrooveLily hits its groove, the all-black set is transformed into a blindingly white palace room (lit by Scott Zielinski) wherein Theseus and Hippolyta (Goede and McLaughlin again) squabble in front of their liveried, 18th-century attendees. This coup de théâtre is quickly followed by a return to a forest dominated by many upstage poles on which the play’s fairies cavort. No ordinary fairies, they’re a half dozen men in scanty black outfits performing bungee-like routines reminiscent of the opening ceremonies of this year’s Olympics. (The aerial design is by Christopher Harrison of Antigravity.)

Clearly, Landau doesn’t lack for ways to kick renewed life into this old Shakespeare warhorse. In homage to previous adaptations of the work, she even throws in a few measures from Felix Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream overture. But there is such a thing as being inventive to a fault, and going for broke often results in something getting broken.

That’s what eventually happens in this busy-busy production. For example, the Pyramus and Thisbe presentation is something of a shambles, with the actors playing instruments. (DeLaria is on tuba, a la Patti LuPone.) Alhough much music has been added to the play — the best of it provided by GrooveLily — the music of Shakespeare’s lines is obscured as Landau and her cast sacrifice clarity and coherence in what might be called, under the circumstances, a Bottom-feeding frenzy.

DeLaria, whose stage performances have become increasingly frantic, is not the only transgressor. A number of the actors are flummoxed by the proceedings and are either caught shouting over them, as DeLaria often does, or are drowned out. Goede flaunts a swell singing voice but garbles the poetry when he speaks. McLaughlin’s Titania seems primarily disgruntled, and that choice undermines the brief comic romance with Bottom. Sargent, Fowler and Martinez are athletic rather than articulate. Only Withers as the tall and gracefully gawky Helena remembers that she’s speaking lines the audience deserves to hear.

Adkins, who often pops up on stage in a black-and-red athletic supporter, has Puck’s twinkle. But he’s too late when, at the curtain, he says, “If we have unearned luck now to scape the serpent’s tongue [he means hissing], we will make amends ere long.” This production doesn’t make sufficient amends for its errors.