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White, Ryan and assorted fairies: bright spirits
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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.
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Rossi, Pratt, Sagay and Kops: issues
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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.
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.
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Roberts, Joung and White: panache
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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.
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.
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Into the Woods ensemble: wish lists
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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."
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.
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Munson, WolfKlain and Nye: the witch next door
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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.
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.
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Ensemble: After "Ever After"
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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?
