A Midsummer Night’s Dream
What you first notice when the lights go down in the theater is that the voice coming through the speaker is telling you to have a nice flight. Surely, it is an attempt to be witty and not actually alluding to the show which is Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But when two rows of bob-haired Thai-looking girls walk on stage with their tidy bright green dresses, the first thought that comes to mind is that they’re flight attendants.
Though the original Shakespeare wasn’t really altered, the way it comes across through the music and the set decoration make it feel different. There was lots of use of the word “ass” and not just to describe what happens when Bottom’s head is transfixed with a bull’s head. And there’s even one part that’s not sung: Puck, who saunters around the stage with a scooter and punk rock fatigues.
But what’s on the show’s mind is ultimately sex. Both Oberon and Titania are played as erotic women. Even if their intimate choreography isn’t cause for alarm, they do kiss quite passionately too. The cat fight between Hermia and Helena is somehow reduced to the mocking of breast size. And even Theseus, donning Elizabethan-era attire save for his Converse sneakers, brags about using his “sword” on Hippolyta with a helpful hip gyration to make the point. Everyone at one point is in their underwear. The height of all this is when bull-headed Bottom gets seduced by Titania. She strips down to kinky black lingerie and does a little bump and grind with him. Then they lie down in various positions.
Britten’s music is complex in its elaborate textures and polyphonic masses of sound, yet , it is mostly based on melodies that are easy to hear and understand. Just as the Thai-influenced futon-based stage was weird and wonderful to behold, the music holds our attention by giving us an amazing variety without sacrificing dramatic tension. I loved the incidental music which the strings were bringing us into the dream work with tremoli and glissandi.
It’s a pretty crowd-pleasing show, and for $20 ($10 for students), it’s also cheaper than the major opera group in town. Like the Long Beach Opera (which the UCLA Opera’s conductor Neal Stulberg has also performed with), the Schoenberg Hall is intimate and the art direction very attractive. With the next shows on February 8,9 and 11, it makes a relatively good pre-Valentine’s Day date.
