Original music, a 1930s movie-set look,
but the magic is still all Shakespeare
LEWISTON — Directed by Martin Andrucki and featuring new music by composer William Matthews, Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is presented in a Bates College production in five performances from March 9 through March 13 in Schaeffer Theatre, 329 College St.
The performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Monday, March 9-10 and 13; 5 p.m. Saturday, March 11; and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 12. Admission is free (a $5 donation is gratefully accepted), but tickets are required, available at Eventbrite — bit.ly/bates-midsummer17. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.
Described by the New York Times as “one of the most surefire comedies ever written,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a tale of a wedding, a love quadrangle, theater al fresco, quarreling fairies and magical potions.
Matthews’ contribution to the Bates production includes a song for the fairies and one for the character Nick Bottom, as well as music for dance sequences and what director Andrucki describes as “a sonic landscape for the whole show.”
With a Bates cast of 19 and four interconnected plots that include a sojourn in Fairyland, the piece gives an audience plenty to keep track of.
Yet the play’’s structure makes the narrative “pretty easy to follow,” says Andrucki, Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater. He last directed “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Bates in 1995. “You’’ve got several subsets of characters in the story,” he explains, “and the action moves clearly and logically from one group to the other.”
With most of the characters being young (or being fairies and therefore ageless), the play is a good fit for a college cast. “I didn’’t need to find a 20-year-old Lear,” Andrucki says. “And the characters are involved in stuff that’s immediately accessible to our students: being crazy in love, putting on a play, messing around with magic sex flowers.
“But it’’s Shakespeare, so there are challenges for the actors — understanding the language and speaking it with clarity and confidence being among the biggest.”
The play was written in the 1590s, but Andrucki shifts the action ahead to a setting that accommodates more contemporary notions of Fairyland: America in the first half of the 20th century, where, he explains, “escape and magic were at the movies.”
Specifically, the Bates production will find its Fairyland “in the world of 1930s black-and-white Hollywood musicals and the beautiful, unreal people who populate them,” Andrucki says — Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, the smiling beauties in the dance extravaganzas staged by Busby Berkeley.
Martin Andrucki, Charles A. Dana professor of theater at Bates College will direct the upcoming production of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”