San Diego Civic Youth Ballet's "A Midsummer Night's Dream": Not Much Theatrically, but What Great Dancing!
Yesterday (April 8) my husband Charles and I went to the San Diego Civic Youth Ballet’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,which we’d heard about last Sunday, April 2, when San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez presented a sample of it, lasting about 20 minutes, at his usual Sunday afternoon organ concert. Of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream began as a play by William Shakespeare, andit’s one of his most convoluted works,mixing Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies,with normal human characters both aristocratic and proletarian. The play centers around the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons, and various amorous intrigues revolve around it. Hermia is the inigénue in love with Lysander, but Demetrius is his rival for her affections and also has a girlfriend of his own called Helena. Hermia’s father Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius instead of Lysander. A group of amateur actors including Nick Bottom the weaver, Peter Quince the carpenter, Francis Flute the bellows-mender, Tom Snout the tinker, Robin Starveling the tailor, and Snug the joiner, are rehearsing a play about the legendary couple Pyramus and Thisbe, which they intend to present at the wedding of Tehseus and Hippolyta. There’s also a mischievous sprite named Puck – though his real name is Robin Goodfellow – who turns Bottom into a sort of were-donkey just as the fairy queen Titania receives a love potion that makes her fall in love, or at least lust,with the first person or creature she sees – who happens to be Bottom in were-donkey form.
Shakespeare’s command of the English language sometimes obscures how good he was as a dramatic constructionist as well; A Midsummer Night’s Dream goes off in som many different directions various directors have chosen either to smooth out its discontinuities (as Max Reinhardt did in his famous 1920’s productions in Berlin and on Broadway and his 1935 film for Warner Bros, with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck) or revel n them and make them as jarring as possible (as Bryan Bevell did in his mid-1990’s production at SanDiego’s Fritz Theatre, which Chalres and I attended and I reviewed in the early days of Zenger’s). In 1826 German composer Felis Mendelssohn wrote a concert overture based on the play (with some hilarious sound effects to represent Bottom’s donkey state), and in 1842 he composed a complete score of “incidental music” for the play. “Incidental music” was basically like film music before films were invented; the only difference was that instead of a movie, it accompanied a live performance of a play. Various composers of the 18th and 19th century, including Mozart, Beethoven, Bizet and Grieg, wrote “incidental music” for plays, some of them long-forgotten except when the music is performed in concert. Mendelssohn composed his score for a production of hte play in August Schlegel’s German translation, and for two scenes he supplied music to Shakespeare's song lyrics, which creates a problem when the play is performed in English with Mendelssohn’s music; it’s generally back-translated into Shakespeare’s English.
For their ballet the San Diego Civic Youth Ballet used recordings of Mendelssohn’s score (with the two songs in English), though the full score lasts between 45 and 50 minutes and they repeated parts of it to fill it out to a nearly 90-minute dance performance. The program provided a synopsis of the plot, but I was a bit surprised that while Civic Youth Ballet executive director Kim Thomas had narrated the excerpts for the organ performance the previous weekend, she did not do so for the actual ballet. Through most of the first act I was pretty much at sea in terms of what was supposed to be happening on stage. It was a relief when the famous Wedding March opened Act II and I finally was seeing a dramatic situation I could recognize and appreciate. What I liked best about the performance was the amazing quality of the dancing. The Civic Youth Ballet encompasses all ages of “youth,” from children to teenagers, and the troupe included people old enough to represent the principal characters and be believable in their amorous intrigues. There were so many dancers that even the large stage of the Casa del Prado Theatre, where the perforrnances took place, had trouble accommodating them all during their curtain calls.
Charles and I were both surprised by the sheer size of the audience, and we figured out afterwards that just about everyone in the company brought mothers, fathers, stepmothers, stepfathers, aunts,uncles, sisters, brothers and cousins whom they numbered by the dozens. There was also a steep set of stairs we had to climb to get to the auditorium; I remember wondering how people in wheelchairs were managing this, though as the audience was leaving I saw at least two people in wheelchairs and saw where the ramps were for them. I’m not that big a fan of story ballets – I think the last time I’d been to one before this was John Pasqualetti’s production of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Oakland in 1977 (it was famous and controversial because Pasqualetti ramped up the sexual connotations and included Gay and Lebian, as well as heterosexual, action in his staging) but I had a good time watching the marvelous dancers even though I didn’t find it all that compelling as a theatrical experience.
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