ROMEO AND JULIET
Oak Park Festival Theatre
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This is quintessential summer Shakespeare–women in heavy dresses, men in tights, masterful swordplay, and truly excellent actors, whose flawless diction and delivery bring out every nuance of Shakespeare’s text, allowing the audience to completely forget about the annoyingly overmiked sound system. James Krag and Mary MacDonald Kerr make a splendid, ageless all-American Romeo and Juliet who convey all their characters’ youthful exuberance and folly without sacrificing the maturity of the language.
Equity Library Theatre’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream also avoids the pitfalls of many a modern Shakespeare production. Their secret? Eliminating that most heinous of theatrical afflictions, the bugaboo that more than anything else has been responsible for destroying Shakespeare’s plays–the director. Using what they call the “free Shakespeare” concept, each of Equity Library’s actors “con their parts” independently and, after some rehearsal, essentially improvise the play in front of an audience, so that “the actors and audience discover the play together in performance.”
The worst of the lot is the Actors Center of DuPage’s Macbeth, which, although thankfully devoid of a “concept,” also lacks any good ideas. Jeffrey Baumgartner’s production has the three witches looking and acting like members of the band Kiss, including a Gene Simmons-like display in which stage blood is licked off a post. Cast members routinely blow or garble lines, cues are missed, props are heard dropping offstage, and actors cart around superfluous spotlights and shine them shakily on performers who are already illuminated. And it’s tough to keep a staight face when Macbeth comes out dressed on the bottom with Zubaz pants and on the top like my aunt’s couch.
