Jane Farnol, who plays Oberon's fairy queen, Titania, has a problem with here sibilants, but also has the pleasure of actually flying in through the air on a bowery cloud, looking for all the world like some goddess in a Baroque opera. Theseus (Myles Eason) and his fiancee Hippolyta (Marilyn McKenna) are forgettable portrayals; in fact, I've forgotten them.
The play, being a Renaissance-styled script, has other symmetrically balanced pairs in its cast. The young lovers Demetrius (John Cunningham) and Lysander (Ted Graeber?) are admirably matched, the crisp delivery of the former matching the sonorous timbre of the latter. It is not their fault that they fail to convey much individuality; Shakespeare was interested in their situations, not their personalities.
Their female counterparts, Hermia and Helena, emerge woefully lopsided in performance. Diana Davila's Hermia has an unpleasant voice that an occasion indulges in pure squeal- ing; and she doesn't seem to understand what she is mouthing much of the time. Dorothy Tristan's Helena shows a wider vocal range and considerable skill as a farceuse. When she pleads to Demetrius, "Give me leave...to follow you," she waddles on her knees with comic aggressiveness; and when Lysander describes himself as "touching now the point of human skill," she instinctively grasps her breasts in self-protection.
The mischievous elf Puck is the thread that weaves in and out of the several plots and groups of characters, and holds the work together. For this, Jerry Dodge is unflaggingly admirable. When he says, "And here the maiden, sleeping sound,/ On the dank and dirty ground," his way of dropping vocal pitch on the second line is hilarious. He darts about like lightning, and scampers up a tree as easily as a cat. Indeed, at the core of his performance are postures, gestures, and movements drawn from classical ballet. Although he is understandably not in a class with Arthur Mitchell, who is so extraordinary a Puck in the ballet version of the tale, he is still a splendidly equipped dancer and mime as well as actor.
To James Valentine are entrusted two small roles. As Hermia's father Egeus, he has been directed to overplay disastrously by means of a wheezing delivery. A little of this goes a long way, but he turns the theatre for a while into a vertiable asthma clinic. He also turns Philostrate, master of the revels, into an amusingly effete redhead.
Visually, the production has much to delight the audience, though there is nothing to suggest the Athens specified in the text. William and Jean Eckart have designed a set of six tall white poles, to which are added holed panels, like cheese slices, and fluted sails for the court scenes. When affairs shift to the woods, a trainload of glittering white plastic streamers hangs down like so much Spanish moss.
Robert Fletcher has garbed the aristocracy in Empire costumes of the Napoleonic period, with an emphasis on brown, white, and gold. The two love-smitten maidens wear identical low-necked, high-waisted white gowns, with a blue sash for Helena and a pink one for Hermia. The "mechanicals" are outfitted in rough reds, oranges, and yellows. Fletcher had, paradoxically, a field day with the forest folk--Titania and her fairies in green and pink, the bicorn Oberon and his winged retinue in sequined blues.
Tharon Musser has provided lovely lambent lighting, though its technical execution is distractingly jerky. At one point, taking a cue from Titania's words--"The moon methinks looks with a wat'ry eye;/ And when she weeps, weeps every little flower"--she has all the pendent vegetation come alive with tiny lachrymal lights, while the fairies march out carrying hand torches. A beautiful way to end the show's first half.
Conrad Susa's music for the several dances, songs, and general background is pleasant enough, though it certainly cannot be accused of subtlety (but, then, neither can Mendelssohn's marvelous score). I do wish he had not had recourse, for the shimmering fairies, to the vibraphone; this is too easy, and I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the instrument is inherently vulgar. Susa's score does not come up to the one Marc Blitzstein wrote for the 1958 production. (It is sadly ironic that Blitzstein and director Jack Landau, who contributed so much to the joyous success of the earlier show, have both since become victims of bizarre, brutal murders.)
Near the play's conclusion, Theseus states, "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact." In the current version, there's plenty of lunacy, plenty of love, but precious little poetry. For this Cyril Ritchard must be held largely responsible. He should have faced up to the fact that his attempt to do almost everything himself was, like his own anatomy, characterized by an inability to see his own Bottom