LYCOS RETRIEVER 
A Midsummer Night's Dream: Stage
built 440 days ago
The crowning glory of pictorial realism in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream came in 1900 under the direction of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Like Daly, Beerbohm Tree employed battery-operated lights to illuminate the fairies, including lights placed on Oberon’s breastplate and crown. Many of the fairies were children, one of whom was suspended above the stage. Beerbohm Tree’s most notorious addition came with the 1911 revival when live rabbits appeared following trails of bran around the stage. It was no coincidence that Beerbohm Tree chose to stage A Midsummer Night's Dream when England was entangled in the Transvaal war with the Boers, the seeming beginning of the end for "good old England." A Midsummer Night's Dream had long been a celebration of imperial power — the original production honored Elizabeth I, Purcell’s The Fairy Queen paid tribute to William and Mary, and Vestris’ revival hailed the young Queen Victoria. It soon came to be regarded as a celebration of British culture and after 1890 received constant performance in England by all levels of performers and companies.
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Max Reinhardt staged A Midsummer Night's Dream thirteen times between 1905 and 1934, introducing a revolving set. After he fled Germany he devised a more spectacular outdoor version at the Hollywood Bowl, in September 1934. The shell was removed and replaced by a "forest" planted in tons of dirt hauled in especially for the event, and a trestle was constructed from the hills to the stage. The wedding procession inserted between Acts IV and V crossed a trestle with torches down the hillside. The cast included John Davis Lodge, William Farnum, Sterling Holloway, 18-year-old Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's orchestrations of Mendelssohn. (The young Austrian composer would go on to make a Hollywood career.) On the strength of this production, Warner Brothers signed Reinhardt to direct a filmed version, Hollywood's first Shakespeare event since Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's Taming of the Shrew (1929).
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Happily, A Midsummer Night's Dream on the Outdoor Stage of the Shakespeare Theatre fully hits the mark as summer family entertainment. Amazingly, it succeeds as intelligently examined, first class Shakespeare for adult audiences.
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Three years after Beerbohm Tree brought live rabbits to the stage, Harley Granville Barker produced A Midsummer Night's Dream, the last of his three landmark productions of Shakespeare. Though he recognized the need to move away from some elements of the Victorian pictoral tradition, he ... rejected William Poel’s return to the Elizabethan stage. With his designer Norman Wilkinson, Granville Barker created a set that espoused elements of Poel’s bare stage while incorporating some of the scenic advances of the last century. The design was more symbolic than those of his predecessors, though elements of it were equally lavish. His fairies’ costumes and exposed skin were covered in gold-leaf, causing quite a stir. Still, the focus of the production was the text.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream continues performances (Tues.-Sat. 8:15 p.m./ Sun 7:15 p.m.) through July 28, 2007 at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Outdoor Stage on the campus of the College of St. Elizabeth, Route 124 and Convent Station, Morristown, NJ. Box Office: 973-408-5600; online: www.ShakespeareNJ.org.
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Did you miss Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Well, you are in luck. The state’s premier classical theatre company will bring Midsummer back on Friday, Aug. 3 at 8 p.m. at the Myriad Gardens’ Water Stage. So Thursday it's Cyrano, Friday Midsummer and Saturday is Cyrano again. Thanks to the set crew for the middle-of-the-night set changes.
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