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| White, Ryan and assorted fairies: bright spirits |
Magical Santa Cruz Shakespeare double header all an audience could wish for
Looking for something to brighten your spirits? (And who isn't, these days?)
Fortunately, you need look no further than DeLaveaga Park, where Santa Cruz Shakespeare launched its 2025 Summer Season over the weekend with a pair of boisterous new productions: A Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps the most popular, accessible, and funniest of Shakespeare comedies, and the vibrant musical fairytale mashup, Into The Woods, featuring the elegantly witty songs of Stephen Sondheim.
Beautifully staged under the towering trees of the Audrey Stanley Grove, this year's plays are presented under the theme No One Is Alone (the title of one of Sondheim's pivotal songs). Which, in the case of these first two productions, emphasizes the power of community, and the elliptical, mostly (but not always) comic consequences within that community and ourselves when we make foolish choices, mostly (but not always) in pursuit of love.
Bright spirits abound — literally — in director Paul Mullins' exuberant Midsummer, where the impending nuptials of lord, Theseus (Corey Jones), and Hippolyta (Charlotte Boyce Munson), whose Amazon tribe he has just conquered, play off against a rift in the spirit world between Oberon (ML Rogers) and Titania (Paige Lindsey White), King and Queen of the Fairies. The tentative rapprochement between the mortal bride and groom-to-be contrasts with the scheming erotic gamesmanship of the lustily feuding fairy spouses.
Meanwhile, two sets of young mortal lovers are
having their own issues. Hermia (Allie Pratt), pledged to marry Demetrius
(Elliot Sagay), her father's choice, has instead fallen in love with Lysander
(Nick Rossi). But Demetrius still pursues her, even though Helena (Lily Kops),
a young woman he has dallied with, is now in love with him. Threatened with
death or a nunnery if she doesn't wed Demetrius, Hermia flees into the woods
with Lysander the night before the royal wedding, pursued by Demetrius, who is
pursued by Helena.
Rossi, Pratt, Sagay and Kops: issues
There, they unwittingly become the playthings of Oberon and Titania, and their fairy conspirators. The fairy king directs his antic henchman, Puck (Justin Joung), to apply a love potion to sort out the young lovers into correct pairs while they sleep, but Puck messes up, so that both youths are now fierce rivals for Helena, while Hermia is abandoned.
Further complicating things is a troupe of local craftsmen in the woods to rehearse a play to perform at the wedding the next day. Driven by more enthusiasm than skill, they provide more fodder for Oberon's spat with his queen; the sleeping Titania is charmed into falling passionately in love with the first creature she sees, upon waking — which turns out to be genial, bombastic amateur player Nick Bottom (played with relish by Mike Ryan), now sporting the head of a donkey, via Puck's mischievous magic.
Pratt's feisty, determined Hermia plays in
counterpoint to Kops' forlorn Helena, whose bewilderment at suddenly finding
herself pursued by both swains ramps up to a cleansing dose of outrage that
she's being being mocked. Joung is wonderful as the acrobatic trickster, Puck,
in his headdress of red flames, manipulating a glowing, moon-like orb to
illuminate the fairy revels. Jono Eiland steals every scene he's in as amateur
player Francis Flute, disappointed at first to be cast in the female role of
Thisbe, who nevertheless throws himself into it with hilarious comic abandon.
B. Modern's savvy costumes range from the mortal's sensible neutrals to the
vibrant gemstone colors of the forest fairies, and special kudos to Lighting
Designer Marcella Barbeau for bathing the scene in lush royal purple every time Puck
administers his love potion.
Roberts, Joung and White: panache
You couldn't ask for more brio and panache from a fairy king and queen than the Oberon of ML Roberts (so boisterous a couple of years back as Petruchio in The Taming Of the Shrew), and the Titania of Paige Lindsey White, (astonishing as Polonius in last year's Hamlet, combining a sitcom busybody with tragically fatal hubris in a role generally written off as an inconsequential bumbler).
But it's unusual for the actors playing the fairy monarchs to not be double-cast as the mortal monarchs, as well. Jones and Munson are perfectly fine as Theseus and Hippolyta, but it's almost as if their characters are operating outside of the action, almost superfluous, whereas, when the parts are double-cast, the King and Queen of Faery, and their mortal counterparts are like alter-egos of each other, completing the circle of love, passion, power and foolishness that drives the action.
Still, it's a minor point in a lively, entertaining show.
The company transitions from the Fairy Court to
fairy tales with Into The Woods, the celebrated Broadway musical set in
a magical realm where all the tales we remember from childhood play out
simultaneously. With a book by James Lapine, and a score of smart, intricate
Sondheim songs, the show explores what happens before, during, and after the
traditional "Happily Ever After."
Into the Woods ensemble: wish lists
Directed by Jerry Lee, the show revolves around a humble Baker and his wife who long to have a child. Played by Tyler Nye and Melissa WolfKlain, they provide a foundation of warm humanity for all the fantastical elements to come. In the opening ensemble number, "I Wish," their neighbors also chime in on what they wish for. Gullible innocent Jack (Justin Joung), and his widowed mother (Jordan Best), wish they weren't so poor, and that their elderly cow (Jack calls her his best friend) would give milk.
Tending to the ashes in her rags, Cinderella (Ciarra Stroud) wishes she could go to the prince's festival at the royal castle, while her scheming Stepmother (Lori Schulman), wishes to marry off one of her own harridan daughters to the prince. Little Red (comically plucky Mai Abe) wishes to go visit her granny in the woods, and arrives with an empty basket to fill with the baker's sweets. But their wishes pale next to the desires of "the witch next door" (Charlotte Boyce Munson); turns out she has cursed the baker and his wife to childlessness, but will reverse the curse if they will undertake a perilous journey into the woods.
The stage is set for cross-pollinated tales
(Rapunzel, imprisoned in the Witch's tower, the Three Little Pigs, and a giant
on the other end of Jack's beanstalk also make guest appearances). Surprise plot twists
and much sprightly wordplay ensue on the way to everyone's happy ending — at
least, in the first act. As the stories continue in the second half, beyond the
traditional "The End," the characters and the audience face the
consequences of reckless wishing.
Munson, WolfKlain and Nye: the witch next door
Of course, you can't have a scary wood without a big bad wolf, and this production gives us two — one to menace Little Red on her way to Granny's, and a second to harass those pigs. It's traditional that Cinderella's Prince and Red's Wolf are played by the same actor, but one of its biggest delights in this production is the triple-casting of Elliot Sagay and Alex Cook as both wolves, both princes (Cinderella's and Rapunzel's), and Cinderella's ghastly stepsisters! The cleverest of Austin Blake Conlee's excellent costumes are the tight doublets and leather pants the princes wear, that become the stepsisters' finery with the addition of high pompadour wigs, red velvet bustles, and high heels, pared down to lean, black predator silhouettes under cage-like wolf heads, complete with snapping jaws and lolling red tongues.
As the princes, the actors also get to deliver one of the funniest songs, "Agony," a dual lament that the women they covet are so unattainable — shortly followed by the "Agony" reprise, in which they lament that, having attained the unattainable, their affections are already straying elsewhere. In another musical highlight, "Any Moment," Sagay, as the sly, insinuating alpha wolf, tries to persuade WolfKlain, the Baker's Wife, to give herself up to the alluring, if transitory, pleasures of the woods.
Ensemble: After "Ever After"
Milky White, the cow (not exactly a speaking, er, mooing part, but onstage in many scenes) is an emaciated, but stoic creature of cobwebby white ropes, and Cinderella's twittering birds are hand-held by various whistling actors who swoop and flutter them about. But the most impressive special effect comes from Sound Designer Barry G. Funderburg. The giant is never seen, but every bone-rattling step of the giant coming closer through the woods has us looking over our shoulders; we could swear the ground was quaking underfoot.
Munson makes a marvelous Witch, in both her crone and glamorous personae. Schulman is both a gleefully imperious Stepmother, and a sharp, no-nonsense Granny. Stroud shines as both gutsy Cinderella and the gentler Rapunzel, and Best's exasperated fretting as Jack's mother contrasts with her serenity, and gorgeous ethereal singing as the ghostly spirit of Cinderella's mother. All of them have lovely singing voices, and the entire company delivers Sondheim's intricate lyrics with clarity and verve.
Music, magic, and midsummer madness. Who could wish for more?
