Love may be blind in an era of 90-day fiancés, but at least Titania has an otherworldly excuse for why she’s cuddled up in a flowery bed with a genuine jackass.
Review: New ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ resets show’s standard at the Guthrie
Joseph Haj’s witty production takes its sweet, bravura time as it luxuriates in a lush world of music and magic.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
February 7, 2025 at 7:23PM
She’s under the spell of a magic flower that causes her to fall in love for the first thing she sees. And if that creature has hooves, a prominent overbite and comically suppressed braying, then charge it all to the quirks of the heart.
Titania (Regina Marie Williams) and fool-turned-donkey Nick Bottom (Remy Auberjonois) are but hilarious fairy pawns in Joseph Haj’s verdant “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which opened Thursday at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
Haj’s staging of Shakespeare’s reverie on the wages and whims of love is a splendid delight. Its lush visual design is matched by a soundscape that’s just as varied and whose mood is enhanced by composer and multi-instrumentalist Jack Herrick’s live cinema-style accompaniment.
The pacing of this “Midsummer” is languid, a directorial choice that’s not just because of the tempo of Herrick’s escapist idylls and the fact that the actors deliver Shakespeare’s language with understanding and clarity (bravo). It’s as if Haj, at a time of anxiety, impatience and fear, is inviting us to luxuriate in this diverting world and reset for a magical spell.
“Midsummer” boasts winning performances by the physically gifted Auberjonois, the elegant Williams, Aimee K. Bryant as a singing Tom Snout, John Catron as lord of the shadows Oberon, and Jimmy Kieffer as a towering, NBA-ready Puck. Those are some of the evening’s well-established players whose routine excellence makes their work look easy.
What’s great about the Guthrie’s eighth “Midsummer” since its1963 founding is that it also introduces us to some impressive new talent. Newcomer-to-Minnesota Royer Bockus plays ukulele and serves as a kind of welcoming emcee for the proceedings. She does skillful interactive work with the audience, eliciting love stories.
Styled by costume designer and scenic designer Lex Liang as a tall, flightless bird who takes loping steps across the stage, Bockus also plays Helena, one of the quartet of raring young lovers whose hormones have been confused by the fairies. The other youthful lovers are Ari Derambakhsh, who stuns as Hermia; Justin Withers, who delivers a lyrical and limber turn as Demetrius; and Jonathan Luke Stevens as suave Lysander. They make the Guthrie stage a site of vital merriment.
Stevens not only slings a guitar, but his strumming of the instrument evokes some joyfully familiar Minnesota sounds. When Lysander kneels for Hermia, it’s a homage to a young Bob Dylan that has the Bard of Bemidji taking his place in Shakespeare’s popular romcom.
The young lovers’ storyline is matched by that of the Rude Mechanicals, of which Bottom is a member. They’re trying to put on a play about Pyramus and Thisbe, two Romeo and Juliet-style lovers whose families are feuding, as a gift to royals who’re getting married.
Of course, the Rude Mechs are comically, tragically terrible, with Auberjonois’ Bottom, who plays Pyramus, pulling his heart out during his death scene, stabbing it with a large knife and holding it above his head like some sort of bloody flag.
William Sturdivant similarly dense as Peter Quince, hilariously physicalizes all his spoken words with belabored gestures. Max Wojtanowicz takes the opposite tack with his Francis Flute, underplaying and understating everything to witty effect. Both Dustin Bronson and Kimberly Richardson make much of very little, with Bronson turning a simple lion’s roar into a musical scale and Richardson giving Robin Starveling an apt flightiness.
Humans are but pawns of supernatural forces in this Shakespeare-constructed world, with some agency to influence their small actions but not their bigger destinies.
But the pièce de résistance of this “Midsummer” involves Bockus synthesizing a bit of the audience interaction at the top of the show and a wrapping it up like a bow on a gift. That’s a fitting metaphor for a “Midsummer” that not only sets a new standard for the storied title at the Guthrie. In its bravura way, it is a sweet present to dispel the midwinter blues.
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
Who: By William Shakespeare. Directed by Joseph Haj.
Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.
When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 7 p.m. Sun. Ends March 23
Tickets: $32-$92, 612-377-2224, guthrietheater.org.
Joseph Haj’s witty production takes its sweet, bravura time as it luxuriates in a lush world of music and magic.
