MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM–STAMFORD.

MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT DREAM–STAMFORD. This is a rave review. Mary Jane and I went to see the outdoor production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM at Curtain Call in Stamford. The best production I could ever hope to see. Everything about the production was good. Every actor was good. Mary Jane said that she had never cared before for what happened to the young lovers. (I had seen the Peter Brook production in the early seventies–the one with trapezes– and the yearning of the lovers, isolated in the air, was the strength of that production). Peter Barbieri, Jr., the director, captured both the menace and the beauty of the forest. There were lots of original touches, and they worked. In the first scene, as Theseus and Hippolyta moved off stage, people told me I gasped audibly when I saw that Hippolyta was in chains (Theseus had defeated her in battle). Titania was played by three actresses and that worked, evoking magic and menace–things aren’t predictable in these woods. Finally, the Pyramus and Thisbe play was really funny. (Good actors and directors don’t always know how to do Shakespeare’s clowns. See, for example, the usually excellent Michael Keaton struggling as Dogberry in Branagh’s MUCH ADO).