Another Midsummer Night
If you pardon, we will mend . . .
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There’s nothing inherently wrong with a lightweight musical in the summer, of course; but the similar premises and contrasting results of Goodman’s first and last shows this season are too pointed to ignore. Furthermore, the promise of a new work by composer Jeffrey Lunden, librettist Arthur Perlman, and director Michael Maggio–the team responsible for Goodman’s sublime Wings a couple of seasons back–raises expectations so high that the shallow results can’t help but disappoint. Wings, a musical based on Arthur Kopit’s drama about a stroke victim, was an exquisite, intimate view of a paralyzed woman’s inner life; but inner life is exactly what’s missing from the characters in Another Midsummer Night. Instead of dramatizing inexpressible feelings, as they did so skillfully in Wings, Lunden and Perlman churn out musical pastiche, pedestrian lyrics, formulaic situations, and cheap-shot spoofs–including a parody of performance artists that has about as much bite and credibility as the hokey hippies on 60s series like The Beverly Hillbillies.
Bringing together creatures of Celtic mythology with modern characters, Another Midsummer Night sheds no new light on either world. Its rendition of Oberon, Titania, and Puck hews to the antiquated interpretations that modern Shakespearean practice has so vividly improved upon. Oberon and Titania, played with lustrous operatic voices and stilted poses by Nick Wyman and Mary Ernster, are garbed in regal 18th-century dress (complete with towering white wigs) to match their musical motifs, which imitate the operas of Handel and Gluck. Puck, meanwhile, is your classic flying fairy-goblin, played by the usually reliable Jim Corti with a mischievous feyness that turns into an increasingly irritating imitation of Danny Kaye at his most self-consciously cute. Choreographer Danny Herman’s imaginative aerial acrobatics, however, are a delight, gracefully executed by Corti and Jennifer Rosin and Lisa Menninger as his fellow fairies, Cobweb and Peaseblossom.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Eric Y. Exit.
