EmailShakespeare by Starlight
A dreamy night in midsummer
Maybe it was the weather? After suffering through the endless rains of “Junuary,” getting some beautiful weather this last weekend meant an epic turnout for Shakespeare on the Sound at Rowayton’s Pinkney Park. I had never seen such a crowd for one of these annual productions. The fact that it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream made it perfect.
Of course, in Rowayton, the great party town, nobody needs much of an excuse to start whooping it up. And there was much whooping and laughter in the waterfront park.
The production now moves to Greenwich’s Baldwin Park between July 4-12 (except Mondays), at 7:30 p.m. A hugely enjoyable version, it is definitely worth an evening. Pack up a blanket, a bottle and a beach chair and go.
This is a somewhat modernized version, with the actors wearing contemporary clothes and an original score by Stew. The stage itself was a long catwalk surrounded by the audience.
During intermission, I began counting off the times I’d seen Shakespeare given some sort of modern “treatment.” I think at least a third of the Shakespeare I’ve seen in my life has been somehow amped up. One of the more jarring productions I ever saw was Alan Bates doing Hamlet in London. The entire stage was sheets of galvanized tin that would slide and move apart, and out would come an actor in period garb offering his lines. It was only a trifle distracting.
I’ve always wished I could go back in time to see the version of Macbeth that Orson Welles directed in 1936 with an all-black cast from the Negro People’s Theatre. Welles was but 20 years old at the time, and this brought him a thundering notoriety in New York. A few stormy minutes of it can be seen on this surviving newsreel.
The current Shakespeare on the Sound production, directed by Joanna Settle, has a lot of raucous energy, which is only befitting of the Bard’s great screwball comedy, in which quarreling lovers get their emotions all mixed up thanks to a naughty night fairy dropping pixie dust in their eyes. Gretchen Hall made a wonderfully confused Helena, who has to struggle with two distant men who become suddenly ardent.
The biggest ball of energy, however, was a Broadway actor named Ty Jones, who invested the comic role of Bottom with a thunderous amount of athleticism, street-corner jive and sheer comic brio. By the show’s end, I wanted this man to host his own TV show.
One of the dangers of modern-dress Shakespeare is that newcomers to the play just might not get what is happening. A couple years ago I had a real hard time following As You Like It, which I had never seen before. The other night, I went to see Midsummers with a group of nine friends, and half adored it and half couldn’t follow it — but liked the sound of it all, anyway. To help us all, my wife went to Web earlier and printed out a students' cheat sheet on the play and passed out copies.
As it happened, I already knew this play very well and laughed all the way through. My knowledge of it didn't from constantly rereading it (or even from seeing Woody Allen’s movie, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy). It’s that I am great fan of the very strange film version made in 1935, an intensely surreal epic based on Max Reinhardt’s cosmic pageantry, acted out by the Warner Bros. stock company of actors, including Jimmy Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and crazed child-star Mickey Rooney.
Not to mention Dick Powell. Never heard Dick Powell do Shakespeare? This is truly one of those “You haven’t lived until—” movies. You can watch it in about 15 installments on Youtube.
Better yet, get down to Baldwin Park and see the play — by starlight.
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