Bard on the Beach - Midsummer's Night's Dream

My posts are all out of order, and I probably just cannot get through all of them until more packing is done, which in practice means in about a week after the huge panic of having the movers come here and dumping junk into boxes.  However, I am making progress.  I have been able to give away a number of books.  I'm doing better on the CD/LP front, getting some cash for them! And we managed to sell off the tricycle on Craigslist in one day, which was a big surprise.

At any rate, my son and I went downtown to drop off stuff at the stores.  We just barely made it back onto the bus that drops you off near Bard on the Beach with only 5 minutes to spare before his transfer expired!  Anyway, I really wish the bus had been earlier (or rather on time), as the skies just opened up on us as we were cutting through the park to get to the box office.  (Another five minutes, and we would have made it.) We really did get soaked.  On the positive side, Vancouver rained itself out for the day, and there was no rain at all during the performance.  While the sets often open out onto the park and inlet, this one has a much larger hole, meaning that the sound of the rain would interfere more with the play (and they'd probably have to crank up the mics, which is never good).

The rude mechanicals practicing!

Bard on the Beach often goes with a populist slant (though hewing fairly closely to the text) and this production was no exception.  There were some references to kung-fu fighting and hip-hop dancing (not quite as elaborate as in The Tempest, however). 

The musical cues were a lot more contemporary than The Tempest (where most of the music was provided by a live string quartet!).  The show opens with U2's MLK.  As Bono croons, the cast comes in dressed more or less in 1950s English costumes with large black umbrellas.  (It definitely seemed appropriate for the day, though as I said, I was more than glad that the rain had stopped!)  I am not entirely sure why there were so many umbrellas on the stage (the black thing to the left in the photo above is a huge umbrella that turns into Titania's bower) and as part of the costumes, but they were fun to look at it.

The rude mechanicals seem from a 1950s panto or something.  Bottom (who was pretty awesome) sort of seemed to be partly channeling Steve Coogan (and had a bit of the look though not mannerisms of Coogan in the little seen (in North America anyway) Saxondale).  The play within a play at the end was pretty hysterical including bits with balloons and sausage that I shall not spoil.

Other amusing musical cues were "I Put a Spell on You" when Oberon puts the love potion on Titania, Prince's "Kiss" when Lysander wakes up and falls for Helena, and a very short bit from "Blurred Lines" when Demetrius wakes up and also falls for Helena.  When Titania wakes and sees Bottom, they used Etta James' "At Last."  At the end, they replayed MLK, and then to usher folks out, they used Pharrell's "Happy" (my son loves this song...).

The fairy costumes, particularly Oberon's and Titania's, were pretty awesome.  Oberon looked a lot like he was King of Siam, and he had some great moments.  Puck was good, though I have to say, I thought some of the vocal tics on the most famous lines was a bit annoying (sort of like a one-hit-wonder band tired of singing their song and changing it up a bit).  I thought that was a bit unfair to the newbies in the audience (and there were quite a few).  There were a lot of children in the audience, which I thought was great.  My son's impression was overall very positive, particularly when we see the terrible performance by the rude mechanicals.  However, he would have preferred a version with the dialogue in contemporary English.  Sigh.  I do understand the temptation to modernize it, but it seems such a dangerous path to go down, and I am glad (for myself anyway) that Bard on the Beach is generally pretty good about keeping to what Shakespeare actually wrote.  One very minor detail that productions do change up a bit is whether Hermia's father, Egeus, comes around to accepting Lysander as a son-in-law or not.  You basically can go either way, as Shakespeare is completely silent on the point.  (Egeus has no lines after Theseus overrides his will.)  In this production, Egeus stomps off, unreconciled, and doesn't come back for the wedding banquet and performance.  (It would also be possible for him to chill out and thus come to the wedding and (silently) watch over the proceedings.)

Curiously, this clocks in at 2 3/4 hours, so is just slightly longer than The Tempest.  If you are in Vancouver this summer, I would highly recommend checking out both Midsummer's Night's Dream and The Tempest, as I think they are both very strong, entertaining performances.  If I wasn't leaving in a week, I might even go a second time, which I very, very rarely do*.  As I said before, it is a nice high note to end on, though it may not be the very final play I see in Vancouver, as I am still holding out some hope of seeing Gruesome Playground Injuries if I am far enough along in the packing, which means I need to make a lot of progress today, so I had better get back to that.


* In fact, it may be I have never done it, though I saw Crazy for You on Broadway and then the touring version in Toronto six months later, which was essentially the same production.  The last time I was really tempted to see the same production of a play twice was David Henry Hwang's Chinglish at the Goodman, but I couldn't swing it.  It's been playing in California and a few places on the West Coast but not close enough.  I'll keep my eyes open if it comes to Toronto.