Obstructed View

Wesley: Hi, I’m Wesley.

Robyne: and I’m Robyne.

Wesley: and this is Obstructed View. 

Robyne: Today we’ll be discussing Dracula by Three Day Hangover. Dracula was presented at the McAlpine hall at West Park Church.

Wesley: This performance was done immersively with a bar that was integrated into the performance.

Robyne: If you don’t know the story of Dracula, we’ve linked a synopsis in the show notes. This piece by Steven Dietz and Lori Wolter Hudson is a liberal adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. Let’s jump right into design.

Wesley: So we have scenic and lighting design by Christopher and Justin Swader, sound design by Toby Jaguar Algya, and costume design by Caitlin Cisek. 

Robyne: I really liked the costumes. I loved how they found ways in all of the design elements under what I assume to be a very low budget, to really honor the story and the period from which this story comes. I found the proffesor’s costume to be very well contemporized. I found both Mina and Lucy’s costumes to be fitting of their characters. And all of the men seem to be fairly well dressed. I only didn’t necessarily care for Renfield’s costume, but it worked within the story and the design. 

Wesley: I thought the costuming worked well for what they were achieeing here. My only point of issue was Dracula, I thought his was a bit more on the grotesque side, a bit too flamboyant, a bit too 1970s. And when you’re contemporizing almost all these characters, he came off a bit dated and that was something that I couldn’t just grasp why.

Robyne: I found that in the greater style of the piece that it fit, that he was a little dated. It didn’t bother me too much but I totally understand what you’re saying. I did think that the teeth work was wonderful, those prosthetic teeth up close looked great. 

Wesley: Yeah, teeth were great. I enjoyed the make up work.

Robyne: I also like what they did set wise with dressing the room as they did. I understand that they couldn’t build a full set but there were a lot of things I liked about it. As you said when we first walked in to the room, I really liked how there was only one portrait on the wall. I really liked how bare most of it was, it really helped with the foot traffic in the immersion.

Wesley: I, on initial impact, I appreciated the space greatly. It was large, it was cavernous, I liked the scarcity of what they used. There was a bit of difficulty of deciding where we can and cannot sit, I noticed a few people stumbling around trying to find a place to find a seat. But there was nothing really that distracting. I appreciate how they had to work with the sparcity of the space, transporting us from one world to another during the performance, though I wish there was a bit more integration into the actual foundation of the space itself. I never felt as though I was brought into a world with the hall around me, I felt as though I was always dealing with specific set properties being brought out in front of me. That with how statically they had the audience stand for great swaths of the performance where seats could easily do.

Robyne: The immersiveness lost it’s fun when the scenes started to run over five minutes; I found myself standing for large periods of time. And the worst part of this production for me was the other audience members. Given that this was an immersive, Bar Theater piece, I was fully prepared for a lot of the interactions I was going to have, but there seemed to be a lot of clueless audience members who kept backing into one another, there were a lot of spilled drinks, there were a lot of elbows, and a good deal of that was unnecessary.  While there was a lot of guidance given by either the cast out of character or by other members of the production team herding us along in this small room, there still was a lack of clarity in what was habitable space and, I agree, we were standing for far too long without moving. We should have been able to sit at certain points.

Wesley: I’ve been in immersive situations where you finally form a bond of community with the audience around you experiencing the piece. For example, when I saw Speakeasy Dollhouse at the Player’s Club or, probably one of my favorite of these, A Serious Banquet, by This is Not a Theater Company, I felt as though I made friends that evening, experiencing this theatrical production, being immersed in this world with them. Here everyone else seemed a little bit intrusive. And given how big the hall was, I really felt lost with them.

Robyne: In this style you have a spectrum and on the one end you have something like A Serious Banquet which is a party that everyone is invited to, and on the other end you have Sleep No More, which is completely isolationist.

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This fell somewhere in between without any real intention of how this piece is suppose to interact with the audience and how the audience is suppose to interact with each other. It felt as if no attention was paid as to what we were suppose to feel.

Wesley: Granted, I don’t feel as thought the immersivity was suppose to be a gimmick, but it didn’t feel integral.

Robyne: There were fun moments with the sound design and a lot of the practical, from-the-audience sounds. There was this howling bit they kept having us do that had a great deal of diminishing returns at the end. There was an expectation I felt that the audience was supposed to be much drunker than we were.

Wesley: The interaction with us felt like a necessary evil on their part as if they had to follow through with the immersivitiy and so the scenic design of this world never really managed to put it into a framework in which the immersivity was a necessity to the story telling. 

Robyne: I did not feel that the immersiveness was used to transport us into this world and to make this interactive, to feel like we were involved in the world. I didn’t really know why we were being immersed in this. This may have just as easily been done in a proscenium and it may have worked far better.

Wesley: Lighting design by Christopher and Just Swader as well, I had no real issue with.

Robyne: The, again, clearly were limited on what they could do both financially and in the space. It worked fairly well. There’s a moment of audience interaction, that we’ll discuss later, using the lighting that was probably the highlight of the show. Overall, lighting was fine.

Wesley: Yeah. They had a couple nice effects: the red that backlight Dracula when he entered, it had a nice 1980s Pop-film kind of vibe to it.  We recognize this was a very limited budget production, and for what they were probably able to work with on that level this was excellently achieved.

Robyne: Dracula is presented in this downtown, nerd, bar theater style that holds a certain amount of irreverence for the material, usually a great deal of irreverence for the material, and is filled with anachronisms. I have seen a great deal of this sort of theater and it is usually blunt and less funny than it thinks it is, and unfortunately I found that prevalent throughout Dracula.

Wesley: There was a lot of joy in the performers getting a chance to perform but I felt no love for the characters, no love for the material –

Robyne: There is a great deal of finesse required to pull off a show of this nature very well. A lot of the references felt very heavy handed, a lot of the modernization of the script felt blunt. There’s a number of times where they pull out their phones and the dialogue doesn’t sound like humans of today’s world discussing the use of technology. There was just some very rough moments of, I could almost feel the collaborators asking, “Well, how does this sound? This works.” With no smoothing out of the language.

Wesley: The pop-culture references, they were so unnecessary. The anachronisms never gelled well. They felt like a style that was meant to feel novel but I have seen it so many times before that it just felt stale, and rather than making this show feel more timely,  it just felt more dated.

Robyne: There were a number of them that worked but they were just unfortunately buried beneath seven more that didn’t.

Wesley: There were also many times that they would reference the bar, and drinking, and being drunk, which, it was funny before you’re legally able to drink. Like they’re the sort of thing that people would say in a college movie. Here, it as so self congratulatory and invaise. 

Robyne: It is a necessary part of the production, it is an intential design element and that can be a great deal of fun, but there is a fun, in-character way to discuss this and there is a forceful reminder that the ticket cost is low and you should be drinking and it’s part of the production. Which is totally fine but there is a way to convey that without swearing at your audience, which can be fun but in this instance absolutelywas not.

Wesley: There was one instance I enjoyed and the was January Lavoy playing Yeungling. Her coming out as this sort of meta, product-placement character –

Robyne: That anachronism, that contemporization, that kind of meta-theatrical element is what this entire style is built upon.  And January was not only wonderful in that role, and I would almost say tongue-in-cheek, very self-aware, character,

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but the renaming of Van Helsing, and having her constantly bringing that element of the drinking into it, having the audience partake in the drinking as part of the story telling, was wonderful. Having her offer beers as weapons was a great addition, was more of what I was hoping to see in this production. But the bruskness of having your characters remind the audience that the bar is open during intermission, the constant, “Time to take a shot!” felt like a younger, recent post graduate, theater company.

Wesley: It felt like an app they were able to get for a cheap price but in order to be able to do anything with it you need to buy all the upgrades in it. It felt like we were being held hostage to this bar.  Rather than it being a joyful part of this world we’re in, it felt like a necessary evil to appreciate this thing that I was entirely unable to appreciate on any level of sobriety.  That’s not to say that the performers were drowned by the piece.

Robyne: January Lavoy’s Professor was wonderful, was just the embodiment of how great this style can work. I also really enjoyed Nemuna Ceesay’s Mina, it felt like a wonderful modernization of this character, holding kick-ass American feminist ideals while also still honoring the source material. I thought Miranda Noelle Wilson Lucy and Jonathan Finnegan’s Seward were both great and I loved their relationship. A lot of the modernization and meta aspects of their relationship, the constant back and forth about what level their relationship was, whether they were lovers or friends, I thought worked very well most of the time. Justin Yorio’s Harker felt slightly out of place, he was much more serious than the rest of the cast, as Harker is but it just, it just didn’t sit quite right in the irreverent, meta-style. Paul Kite’s Renfield, while I don’t like the character he portrayed, that rapid lunatic, in the stereotypical pop-culture sense, I felt he portrayed that role very well.

Wesley: The rule of diminishing returns with almost every aspects of this production for me grated especially Paul Kite as Renfield. I could always appreciate his commitment and his capabilities but by the end, what was once charming became intolerable. Jokes were hammered and hammered and hammered and almost none of them became funny again.

Robyne: Again I felt the audience was expected to be much drunker and louder than we were. It wasn’t clear whether the production was suppose to take place in a loud, noisy, drunken bar, ad the actors were supposed to be fighting over the audience to be heard. That wasn’t the case, we were paying very close attention. So the often repetitive text became blows, over and over. We only needed to hear that the floor was lava once for Renfield, which is a shame because the man was literally standing up on a piano and that is a great image, seeing that, and the idea of his childishness played in that way, was really great for me. And then it just got repeated and it was so unnecessary. All the repition was so unnecessary.

Wesley: As I said when we left, I was never the audience for this production. The drama was meant to be an aspect of their performance but not an essential part of its success. I didn’t find anything besides the drama to take my attention and because of that I felt so apathetic to their performance. Their commitment to these characters, their commitment to their performances was fantastic. Whether it was the improvisational extremes from Paul Kite or if it’s the more reserved Justin Yorio, I could appreciate that they each brought an aspect of their craft to their performance. But in terms of the actual telling of the story, there was little I could grasp on to. And there was so little novelty in humor or in storytelling for me to have a good night with.

Robyne: I felt that this production really suffered from something I see a lot which is the lack of a strong, critical producer. Somebody who has a greater sense of the show in mind who can also level some of their experience and economy towards the work itself, the language, the humor, the staging.

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Every moment a well utilized, talented producer who the company trusts, can really bring that out, or a co-director, or an assistant director, just somebody to offer a contrary voice to not allow so much of this to run off the tracks.

Wesley: A lot of this story was unnecessary, a lot of this dialogue could have been easily noticed to not gain a response in terms of humor and gotten rid of and would have given us more time to be immersed in the space they were creating.

Robyne: There was also only one level of humor, they only offered us low-brow and a great deal of low-brow humor. There wasn’t a mixed bag, there wasn’t high-brow humor coming from Dracula and low brow humor coming from Renfield, which I felt was a shame because that would have been a wonderful balance.

Wesley: There was no character delivered with a real wit to them. They were all given to us as either satirical images of their characterization or satire of storytelling. They were never in themselves clever characters.

Robyne: or simply characters given witty dialogue.

Wesley: Granted, I cannot say I’ve seen a Three Day Hangover performance before, though I will say here I don’t feel as though I saw any aspect of Dracula that night and I was hoping I would. I was hoping I would get a sense of the portrait of Bram Stoker involved in this.  I feel as though that portrait would have been rolling its eyes and at best smirking.

Robyne: There were moments in this production that could have lended themselves wonderfully to very meta performance structure, where the one portrait of Bram Stroker is involved. There were moments where they could have broken the style and really gone for actual horror. When you are standing in that room full of people in the dark and you feel people moving around you, there are all the elements you need for some true horror. But we never got that, it was always the same one note, and it went on relentlessly and for too long.

Wesley: You read Dracula a while back and I asked you when it was done, “Does Dracula have a sincere sense of mystery and sexuality to it?” and you said you think it does.

Robyne: Right. So something I really loved about the first act of this production was there seemed to be a very clever adaption of the sexual commentary from Dracula, which, in its time, in its place, was a very risqué novel to come out. The description if the encounters, the very sexual nature of Dracula’s existence, his appearance, was initially well handled and seemed to just vanish into this myriad anachronistic reverential material.

Wesley: When they did attempt sexuality it came off like the lovers in Midsummer. It didn’t come off as people with actual sex drives. They might have been going for the cloistered sense of the Victorian but I found nothing about their existence to be grounded in actual sexuality. Every aspect of it felt like characterization. Which just brings me back to why do Dracula? Why do this piece if you’re not going to commit to any aspect of the source material? The story itself isn’t enough, there needs to be some aspect of Dracula you find enticing to put on stage. And it wasn’t the mystery, it wasn’t the sexuality, it wasn’t the politics, and it wasn’t any aspect of the death. It was on a Scary Movie level, “Hey, here’s a thing. Let’s make fun of it.”

Robyne: It almost felt as if it was a Mystery Science Theater or a Rifftrax version of a new Hollywood adaption of Dracula. I felt as if I was sitting around watching that episode with kids from high school who I didn’t really like.

Wesley: The audience was not the best.

Robyne: As an audience member I didn’t know exactly what I was being invited to, which is a huge aspect of these immersive bordering on interactive pieces. There was a lot of fun that we were invited for. When Dracula first comes out, when Michael Borelli first comes out as Dracula, and he has a marker and he “bites” peoples necks, that was fun, and went on just long enough. And Borelli had that playful, very self aware, I almost want to say folksy Dracula, that “TRANSYLVANIA” thing going, which felt completely inaccurate but funny because of its inaccuracy and worked within the world. But was not on the same level as January Lavoy’s Professor pulling out Yeunglings and shooting them off, that is a different level of fun. 

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Wesley: And an aspect of this performance was their self-referentialness, which I always found more fun if this was improv. A lot of the jokes they’re making, a lot of the things that were happening came off as though this would be great in the spontaneity of improv. But knowing that this was scripted, practiced, and rehearsed in that space, I’m not sure for how long but for any amount of time, it came off as gimmicky and patronizing to me.

Robyne: yeah, it was, again, all one note. And that’s fine for a style but you have to be aware that you’re going to alienate a great number of your audience. And unfortunately I was a both a person who loves this style but also a person who was put off by this piece. There was an absolutely wonderful moment in this production.

Wesley: Yes there was.

Robyne: Which, spoilers, once Lucy has been turned by Dracula and the rest of the company is there to end her second life, they kill the lights and they ask us to turn on the flashlights on our phones to act as the sun. Then there is a second moment of Seward and Lucy singing Total Eclipse of the Heart, which was this wonderful, bizarre, anachronistic, hyper-meta theater style choice that absolute perfection.

Wesley: It was hilarious because it was still good craftsmanship. It said something about the characters it said something about their situation, it said something about the world we were in, and it was smart too. The idea that they would be singing Total Eclipse of the Heart, to a vampire was hilarious. And I adored Miranda Noelle Wilson in that role. If this show ended in that scene this review would be going very differently right now because that scene was hilarious and heartfelt and beautiful and it came off with love of the source material.

Robyne: And the moment right before that, was a great choice, where she comes through the doors, covered in blood all over her white dress, singing Come Little Children, the song from Hocus Pocus that Sarah Jessica Parker sings coming to steal the children, and it almost felt like this was going to be a commentary on darkness and vampires and those moments were wonderful in that sense. But the ending just kind of happened.

Wesley: Not only did it just happen, it just happened for a very long time. The coda after the actual climax of Lucy’s death took forev-

Robyne: Dragged. It dragged. And I really wish we had not seen the death of Dracula. This very easily could have been forty minutes shorter. You cut at the end of that and you finish not knowing where Dracula is. You don’t tell the whole sotry and you leave – If you are ending with that monologue about ‘once darkness is introduced, despite the fact you know it isn’t real, it will always haunt you’, because society is obsessed with vampires, that would have been a wonderful place to leave off, with that monster still out there. But it jus- it was so long.

Wesley: And then were dealing with, honestly, less interesting, more grounded characters that don’t compel us in the same way that these two did simply because these two, their characters, more match the style for which they are portraying. A lot of the style I don’t like because it’s what I call ‘Fun as Aesthetic’, we’re showing you fun instead of actually having fun ourselves or making sure you have fun, we’re forcing this sense of fun upon you without actually committing to creating it in the world. But there, in that death of Lucy, it was all there for us.

Robyne: We were involved, it was a great reference, it was a great concept, the acting was wonderful in that moment, the whole, everything came together, every element of this production was there.

Wesley: And it almost makes me more angry because is shows you what the rest of this production could have been.

Robyne: Right. And at that point, after that, you’re dealing with an audience that’s been standing, not walking around and moving but standing, for two hours, that’s sobering up and those things all combine to drag out.

Wesley: All those things combine to make this ending that much less engaging.

Robyne: So then I guess the question is, Wesley, is Dracula worth the $15 ticket?

Wesley: No. Because it’s not just the $15 ticket but the amount of drinks you’d have to get from the bar to make this experience successful.

Robyne: I would argue that this is a very specific style and if that is your cup of tea, then it is absolutely worth the $15 ticket. It is fun, irreverent, nerd, bar theater, and as long as you are not going in for a reverent retelling of Dracula you can have a lot of fun at this production.

Robyne: As always, you can find us at Obstructed-View.com, on facebook at facebook.com/ObstructedViewPodcast, on twitter @Obstructed_View, on soundcloud at soundcloud.com/obstructedview, or email us at [email protected].

Wesley: I’m Wesley.

Robyne: And Robyne

Wesley: And remember,

Robyne: Blood will have blood.  

[We apologize for the sound quality of the episode. We had some mic issues which caused some problems in editing.] 

Robyne: Hi, I’m Robyne.

Wesley: and I’m Wesley.

Robyne: and this is Obstructed View. 

Wesley: Today we’ll be discussing the Company XIV production of Cinderella at the Minetta Lane Theatre under the direction of Austin McCormick.  

Robyne: Today we’re going to start talking about the concept of the production and Austin McCormick’s style.

Wesley: Company XIV is a burlesque circus that has taken over the Minetta Lane Theater and was previously performing across from the Public Theater in Astor Place. Their work survives on incredible design, fascinating choreography, and a high level of technical skill put towards unselfconscious frivolity. 

Robyne: A lot of what we saw in this production, and Wesley might be able to speak for the company’s design as a whole, was a self defined new Baroque Ballet. It was a very bare-bones, I would say deconstructed, Rococo, Louis XIV what Wesley would describe as melange. For this production our design team was: Choreography, direction, and sound design by Austin McCormick, set and costume design by Zane Pihlstrom, lighting design by Jeanette Yew and Devon Jewette, make-up design by Sarah Cimino, and stage management by Nataliya Vasilyeva.

Wesley: I really cannot stress enough how incredibly fully realized the design of this production was.

Robyne: Something I really loved about this production was how cohesive all of the designs were. The world felt complete because every element was there supporting the others and it was beautiful.

Wesley: Absolutely, the lighting design by Jeanette Yew and Devon Jewette was sublime. The way certain lights hit chandeliers in the space, the way they filled that world using smoke and lights and mirrors everywhere.

Robyne: The use of an old-school, large spot light that sat just off stage but visible to the audience to light one of the performances was divine.  

Wesley: So one of the things I really love about Company XIV’s design, and I noticed this last year when I saw Nutcracker Rouge, and it really goes to the heart of what makes them work very well, is that they take the best of every era and seamlessly blend them into a cohesive whole. You see design elements that speak to old time Hollywood Golden Age, you see design elements that speak to Weimar and Belle Epoque and Louis XIV and all these fascinating eras, but they never feel intrusive to the world they’re making for us. What makes it work so tremendously well is how the finesse in creation of each of these comes from immense study and immediacy in performance, and that goes I think a lot for Austin McCormick and his trust in his designers, and the designers in their finesse and creativity.

Robyne: And I love how they can take this high style and mix it with contemporary anachronisms. So in this production we got a lot of covers of songs in different languages in different styles that were scintillating.

Wesley: When the sisters enter, for example, they sing the song Sisters from White Christmas, but in German and as conjoined twins – like it’s, it sounds absurd but the joy of it and the oddity of it and the sensuality of it is incredible.

Robyne: There is an aspect of beautiful grotesqueness running through out this production. It gives me the sense that this is how Austin McCormick views humanity, as this divine, glorious, disgusting ‘Thing’, and that is so in-line with my taste. I absolutely love the stylistic world that they created.

Wesley: It’s something that I noticed last year when I saw Nutcracker Rouge, and it’s something that I noticed here – the design work from every angle did not give you a moment to question the abilities of anybody involved in this performance.

Robyne: And every element of the design supported the production as a whole. There was nothing that felt out of place and there was nothing that did not feel necessary. I don’t know what could have been removed and left the piece intact.

Wesley: Which is incredible given that this is Baroque style. Because Baroque is, of course, many different layers, many different elements coming in and out. This performance isn’t reductive in design. There are many things happening at any given time, but I wouldn’t wish any of it away.

Robyne: No, it was the illusion of bareness. There is the idea that you as the audience can see all of the contraptions and mechanisms.

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Robyne: The use of creating, in the set, in Zane Pihlstrom’s set you can see the frame, a literal giant frame that is used as a proscenium that is offset and angled to the audeience and about halfway into the stage.  And it’s gorgeous. You can see all of the contraptions happening on the sides, you can see the performers drawing the curtains. And it works so wonderfully together as a concept.  This is clearly a design team that loves and trusts each other and everyone is on the same page.

Wesley: One of my favorite elements in terms of set design, which is then, of course, in cohesion with all the other design elements, was upstage there was a chandelier that was on the ground, and it wasn’t hanging by anything, and every once in a while the lights in the chandelier were lit and it caused this nice, gentle backlight onto the performers. And t’s little things like that, instead of having lights put a chandelier on the ground; the amount of commitment to the images in the designers’ heads. And also I think this all goes to the concept of Cinderella as a story about smoke and mirrors, as a story about finding a way to present yourself differently to the Prince, and find a way to escape. And it all read incredibly, beautifully well. 

Robyne: And the overall sense of brokenness, the overall sense of this gentle decay that permeated the entire piece. The costumes I loved for the most part, it was perfectly in line with the style. You really got to see the absolute beauty of the performers moving; which, Austin McCormick’s choreography, in every style, was gorgeous.

Wesley: Yeah, his choreographic work, even on a clinical, academic level, beyond the sensuality of the burlesque, which is so integral to the way he works, is fascinating and is beautiful and could probably hold it’s own if the performers were wearing street clothes. But with the added bonus, with the gravy of it being burlesque, it came so much more alive. And the transcendence of such choreographic work was added to instead of reduced from.

Robyne: And it’s important to state that if you are sensitive to seeing mostly nude bodies this might not be the piece for you, but I guarantee you that you will lose the sense that you are looking at sexually clothed bodies and just be lost in the beauty of their movement.

Wesley: It’s very much like you said, the Rococo paintings. It really comes with that delicacy as if you were walking through the sculpture gardens of Versailles.  Like they’re … They are sculptural in the way they are formed. And that doesn’t just go to their physical capabilities, that goes to the way they are presented, the way they are framed by this design team.

Robyne: The performers become part of the art; the movement is all Art. It is non-sexual. It is sexual, but it is not sexualized. It is not for Dionysian pleasure, it is not erotic, it is –

Wesley: There’s nothing prudish about it.

Robyne: There is a joy in their humanity.

Wesley: If you don’t think you will enjoy this performance because you think that they are either be using their sexuality in this burlesque framework as a gimmick, or you are made uncomfortable by seeing the nude form on stage, I think that they will be able to transport you to a level that you will be able to appreciate it on a mere culinary level, at the very least.

            I know I keep on harking on the chandelier but there is a moment I remember watching and I looked up and there was a spot light above me hitting a chandelier going away from the stage. That is the kind of meticulousness in vision that Austin McCormick has and in his collaboration these designers to recognize that these are the things that transport us; these are the things that put a flavor in our mouths when we sit in that theater.

Robyne: That level of detail shows that Austin McCormick loves what he does and he loves the art of storytelling and he has found his medium. This production is magic. It will transport you. It is absolutely gorgeous. It is highly stylized, and you might not enjoy the style but you cannot argue the execution.

Wesley: One of the things I enjoy about Austin McCormick’s work is that I have no doubt that he is one of THE Visionaries right now of downtown theater. And the thing about visionaries is that very often they become constraining on their collaborators. I felt each person on this stage is getting to do exactly what they wanted to do when they woke up this morning. 

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Everybody there brought something to the piece only they could bring.  He is not only a visionary, but I’m also getting the sense that he is a collaborator in the construction of his work.

Robyne: But that is not to say that the production is perfect. I did have some major issues with a few elements in this show. There was a BDSM theme that came through in some of the costume designs, for instance the horse. The creation of the horse, which in production, in performance, was gorgeous, but the elements of BDSM that strayed from the Step-Mother, which totally worked and made sense with her, lost me at certain points, and I did not understand why we needed tat pain and suffering for beauty.

Wesley: The BDSM horse didn’t mesh with the sexuality that was being presented to us by the rest of that scene. The rest of that scene was very delicate, very floral, and it was very gilded with a gentle sexuality; and to have the horse brought in, and if it were a plot shift to have that kind of sexuality introduced, would be one thing. But instead, that kind of sensuality is accepted as the same to all the others in that particular scene, which was a little jarring in comparison to the seamlessness of the rest of the design. 

Robyne: Completely, and I only worry that that decision will alienate a number of audience members and it will be used as evidence of perversion, when I found the rest of the production to be gorgeous and human and beautiful.

Wesley: And that’s not to say that BDSM couldn’t have been involved in this performance, I mean -

Robyne: No, I think it’s used exquisitely with –

Wesley: The Step-Mother.

Robyne: The Step-Mother

Wesley: Yes.

Robyne: I think when it made sense characteristically it worked very well. The cruelty shown threw very well. I just don’t think it was necessary in this moment.

Wesley: I do like the idea that BDSM could be portrayed in a way that is something besides “This is a Broken Person” cause most of the time in performance BDSM is a sign of a person being harmful or sinful and I would like to see it put into a gentler context. But here it just didn’t mesh on the same level that other design aspects meshed.

Robyne: And when we say BDSM we don’t mean there was actual –

Wesley: YEAH.

Robyne: - flogging happening on stage. But the use of leather, the use of a leather Horse Mask, really lent itself towards that style. And as in 50 Shades of Grey when you do not accurately portray BDSM as the often loving, mutual respectful, however varying from the sexual norm, relationship that it typically is, it becomes this grotesque thing, and that is very unfair to represent.

Wesley: This is a small bump that we are talking about, honestly.

Robyne: Maybe two minutes of the entire production.

Wesley: That I didn’t so much have a problem with as much as I became conscious that I was watching something sexual happen in front of me.

Robyne: It took me out of being transported into this world. 

Wesley: Exactly.

Robyne: For the most part though, the costumes I absolutely loved. I adored The Prince’s costume.

Wesley: Hee.

Robyne: I love how – the costumes are, on the men, little more than dance belts.

Wesley: Yeah.

Robyne: Which is typical of a dance production in which you are highlighting the absolute gorgeousness of the human body. On the women, they are equally as revealing without sexualizing the nudity of their forms; while also giving homage to the eras from which you are borrowing the dances.

Wesley: Mhmm. You see a lot of corsets, you see a lot of the skeletons for hoop skirts and other sort of Monarchal wear.

Robyne: But striped down to simply the hoop, striped down to simply the bare bones. Which, it’s that idea of being bare, that idea of only what is there to lend to the imagination – that you can see that this is what would be underneath 

Wesley: And they did wear shoes that were pertaining to the Louis XIV style, which I enjoyed greatly because that was a huge culture part of the culture back then, the shoes.

Robyne: And the shoes were all gorgeous. There was the entire shoe number where The Prince was searching for Cinderella and they brought out pair after pair after pair of absolutely gorgeous, exquisite shoes, that no one wore, that just sat upon the stage to be looked upon as Art themselves in a way that was not flamboyant or exuberant or self-indulgent of the costumer but felt so perfectly in this world.*

            *[Since recording this scene has been moved into Act I and is used as the dressing of Cinderella by the Fairy.]

Wesley: This production allows you to indulge, indulge in what you are seeing, indulge in the craftsmanship and in the culinary appreciation of good artistry. And the design team was right there with everything Austin McCormick did.

Robyne: Absolutely. The makeup and the hair work were gorgeous.

15:00

          The androgyny of the performers during different dance numbers when they would often play opposite their own gender, not as a commentary on gender but as a necessity for the storytelling of now “Now we are in a Ball” situation, was wonderful. And the makeup lent itself so beautifully to that style. 

Wesley: And nothing about the sexuality of anybody on stage, nothing about the gender meldings, nothing about that felt unnatural at any point in time. Every flavor offered made sense. You were allowed to appreciate everything on it’s own terms.

Robyne: And the hair was historical and accurate and impressive.

Wesley: There was a wig that comes out in Act III that rivals anything I have seen in Marie Antoinette. There was a boat on it.

Robyne: Yup. It was gorgeous.

Wesley: It was gorgeous.

Robyne: And to delineate between scenes, they had the placards walked across the stage and the, the graphic design there was great. Kyle Ballentine’s detail to the font and the frame of the placards felt like a 1920s inspired Marie Antoinette party. And that is phenomenal, to be able to witness those melding of styles and not feel the alienation.

Wesley: Nor self-congratulatory. I so rarely felt as though somebody was patting themselves on the back for what they just achieved. There was just unbridled joy in show-and-tell here. Often when people make choices stylistically like that, when they make such bold decisions, it comes with the expectation that we will all bow down at their work but here we are allowed to appreciate just what we are witnessing.

Robyne: And to be blunt, when you make such extreme style choices, especially in the burlesque art of being bare, there is often a desperation and a self-indulgence that reeks off of the production and the performances, and I got very little, if any, of that.

Wesley: There were a few moments that I might have felt a glimmer of indulgence on the part of the artists, but by then everything was so well deserved that I almost got joy out of seeing them get washed away with their own work.

Robyne: Absolutely. And that is not to say that there are not moments of self-indulgence in this production that are a part of the storytelling. 

Wesley: Right.

Robyne: And when you see that narcissism juxtaposed with the beauty on stage, it is comical, it is masterfully performed comedy. Which, not to harp simply on the design team, the ensemble of this production was incredibly talented. It was very well balanced and I did not feel as if there was a weak link amongst them.

Wesley: Every one of them is incredible in their own right.  Many of them showing abilities, that perhaps may only be performed on a stage like this. 

Robyne: And the creation of a piece that has so many different dance styles within it is really the only way to showcase all of this talent. I did not feel as if I was being put upon. I did not feel as if any of these dance numbers did not fit. They all worked wonderfully within this production.

Wesley: The performance was done in three acts: first act was Cinderella going to the ball, second act, Cinderella at the ball, third act The Prince finding Cinderella afterwards. In between these acts were entr’actes during which they performed Vaudeville numbers mostly. And a lot of this story was developed using placards and using light levels of dialogue.

Robyne: The Entre Act numbers were wonderful and allowed the Ensemble members to perform solo numbers that were fun and massively impressive.

Wesley: These numbers didn’t often sit in the story nor need they, however, they always did sit well still with the style.

Robyne: The ensemble consists of Hilly Bodin, Lea Helle, Jakob Karr, Nicholas Katen, Malik Shabazz Kitchen, Mark Osmundsen, Katrina Cunningham as the Fairy, Davon Rainey as The Step-Mother, Marcy Richardson and Brett Umlauf as The Step-Sisters, Allison Ulrich as Cinderella, and Steven Trumon Gray as The Prince.

Wesley: As you said, I could not point out a weak link among them. Devon Rainey performing The Step-Mother as a BDSM, Drag Queen worked very well in this world.

20:00

Robyne: The use of a multi-ethnic cast was not bothering. Often you hear companies argue for production with “Colorblind Casting” that are just painful to watch and the coarseness of the handling of race is often so painful to bare. And that completely fell away into this production, into the characters they were portraying. 

Wesley: I feel as though there was nothing that Devon Rainey wanted to do that night than to perform this character. And he suited it very well. And the sisters, Brett Umlauf and Marcy Richardson, not only are obscenely talented peopled, but -

Robyne: Disgustingly talented.

Wesley: Like Cirque Du Soleil levels of talent. But they are also such joys to watch have fun on stage. They clowned, they laughed, they did silly things, and it’s things like this that make me think that talent of this caliber should be allowed to have fun like this all the time. Because when they are this good and this much fun they create such joy in The Step-Sisters. They’re almost impossible to hate as characters because of that, because of all the manic fun they’re having. Allison Ulrich as Cinderella – 

Robyne: Was charming.

Wesley: She didn’t have any real stunt, I would say, to perform. She was very much exhibited on a pedestal when it comes to the talents. Her works were much more going for a transcendent form, more balletic, more delicate.

Robyne: Pure, and naïve, and it gave a gorgeous sense of the purity of this character. The earnestness with which she sought the love of her stepfamily, who only showed her abuse, often portrayed as this sort of BDSM abuse without love, cruel, and, in this day and age, hopefully unthinkable, of how a family should work. And the pureness of her love for them was not insulting, because of her performance. It worked so well.

Wesley: And it matched the Cinderella story. It very much matched the story of this girl that was able to transcend the hardships she is going through. And the points of story telling such as the Step-Sisters and the Step-Mother talking about the ball using text bubbles and using placards and using shadow, were such great ways to reinvigorate a story that, especially in the last couple years, we have heard over and over and over again.

Robyne: Especially in the same year that a major motion picture is released that tells the exact story in high style, gorgeous costuming, gorgeous setting.

Wesley: It wasn’t just the motion picture, there has been – the San Francisco Ballet, the motion picture, Juilliard did a production of it, there was the Broadway production of it; this is a story that for some reason has really come back on a level of force that I haven’t really seen of late in fairy tale. I think this might be my favorite version of, no, let me rephrase that. This is my favorite version that I have seen. This is the most reinvigorating of it that I have seen.

Robyne: I did have issue with Katrina Cunningham’s Fairy. Often she felt dismissive and abusive of Cinderella, very uncaring, in that very sexualized manner that the Step-Mother was. And I don’t know if there was a parallel supposed to be happening there or if there was something to be said about beauty or magic or love, but it just did not ring true to me. Her performances were gorgeous. She had a silk headdress filled with balloons that floated above her that was extraordinary, and, again, divine. That sense of ethereal beauty was rampant, but it didn’t feel right in this world.

Wesley: It didn’t come off as a sense of kindness that I‘ve come to expect of The Fairy Godmother. This didn’t feel as much the woman coming down, and despite how high and mighty she is feels for this girl. This almost feels like fairies in the Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Robyne: It felt completely like fairies. It felt like she was an actual fa– not that fairies are real. It felt that she was a more traditional fairy, that was simply having fun, which I like, but I did not like here.

Wesley: Right. Here her vocal prowess, her stage presence, all these undeniable. In terms of characterization, I would have preferred a more gentle warmth in her conduct with Cinderella.

Robyne: Agreed.

Wesley: Ugh, The Prince.

25:00

Robyne: Steven Trumon Gray’s The Prince, despite being a gorgeous human being, was a gorgeous performer. The fun sexual jokes made at The Prince’s expense, the use of The Step-Mother’s sexuality to sway The Prince into choosing one of her daughters, was great and I felt worked but was a little off-putting, every now and then there was just a little too much of it. But his talent, number one, was incredible, both vocally and in every dance in which he performed was a joy to watch.

Wesley: He enters in a bathtub singing in Russian, I think, and that’s where you start to wonder in this production, ‘What next? What next will you be able to surprise me with?” Because by now, I thought I was prepared for anything, I was not expecting a man in a bathtub to sing Russian. And for me to just give in to it.

Robyne: This performance felt indulgent in the way that Champagne is. It felt warm and amber and like a blanket hugging your body.

Wesley: Right.

Robyne: And I don’t know how else to say that. It –

Wesley: No, it’s true.

Robyne: -was so comfortable and warm and fun and happy, and every performer lent to that.

Wesley: And this is something that not many fairy tale adaptations, maybe more now, tend to do, which is put weight on the male love interest and to make this a person who is enticing in terms of a personality. They normally put all their force into the heroine without actually giving any tangible resonance as to why is she after this person. We know why Cinderella is after him.

Robyne: Yeah. I cannot speak highly enough of the ensemble. Hilly Bodin, lea Helle, Jakob Karr, Nicholas Katen, Mailk Shabazz Kitchen, Mark Osmundsen – the ensemble numbers were incredible. The Can Can, the traditional court dance, the transformation into animals, the, what I will call "Back-up Singer" positions, when The Fairy Godmother was singing – all of their moments of movement and detail and mime and their work in literally the background behind the framed proscenium as they moved behind the curtain to go into performance, had this luxurious, cat like movement to it where they were both apart of the show and watching the show AND watching the audience and that kind of magical, meta-theatrical performance is so fine and so easily mishandled that when it is handled so well comes off with incredible impressiveness.

Wesley: The ensemble are what made the transportation absolute. Their immediacy with us, their ability to be at one with the audience and with the action on stage, and how they weren’t just set dressing, they weren’t just pretty objects on stage, but vital personalities, every one of them. Not all of them had names but I felt as though I knew something about all of their characters in this world, which is incredible for a silent ensemble to achieve. 

Robyne: And the attention to detail in the minor characters which they played, for instance the dance teachers for The Step-Sisters, was great and added a level to this production that wouldn’t have been there if that fun competitiveness wasn’t in every aspect of those two dancers’ faces whenever they took looks at each other.

Wesley: There is a confidence to their performances that allowed them to have fun in what they are achieving. So something that I’ve told people who go to see something like Cirque Du Soleil or something like a fine ballet is stop thinking ‘Wow, look at what they’re able to achieve,’ and start thinking, ‘Wow, look at what people can do.’ And I felt that at so many times during this production, that I was seeing actual achievements of the human race. I felt as though I was seeing the body at it’s best, in a sort of Vitruvian Man, idealistic sort of way.  

Robyne: The stunt work completely faded into choreography.

Wesley: Right.

Robyne: And it was not stunt for stunt sake. It was not a modern dance company presenting stunt as choreography, it was a choreographer utilizing stunt to tell the story in his choreography, that was gorgeous, all within his style.

Wesley: It reminds me of when I was reading about the Commedia dell'arte ballet. The reason we have dancers en pointe nowadays is because Commedia dell'arte performers would go on their tippy toes and it was a stunt that was astonishing and yet people were like, “This is a stunt. It’s amazing.” But it wasn’t considered High Art. It wasn’t until La Sylphide where Marie Taglioni performed en pointe (La Sylphide video) the whole time when people said this was fine, high art. I am seeing that here.

30:00

            I am seeing that transformation of things like aerial hoops, things like flips, no longer being just stunt but going towards that high art realm.

Robyne: I have so often seen aerial hoop work simply done as a demonstration of skill but this was aerial hoop work done so well, which, I do have to point out, and this might be spoilers, the use of the hoop work as the final number between Cinderella and The Prince, didn’t work for me. The Pas de Deux was so gorgeous, was incredible, was the absolute highlight of this production, and while I understand that it was necessary to have that as ball number, those two numbers should have been switched.  There have been few things I have ever seen in my life that have been as gorgeous as that Pas de Deux. 

Wesley: The Pas de Deux that ends Act II or is part of Act II, where The Prince and Cinderella meet is – it was sublime on a grounded level. I agree, I would have liked them to have reversed the two. I would have liked them to meet using the aerial hoops going above the party and on the end of the performance we get Monarchical Ballet at its absolute best. Those dancers, the way they performed in that world, when – the way they interacted with each other’s bodies with both feet on the ground, it’s hard for me to call it a highlight because there’s so many – 

Robyne: All of the dances (laughs)–

Wesley: EVERYTHING was just so incredible. And the hoop work was good too, the worst part about it was they did something better earlier.

Robyne: There was no bad choreography.

Wesley: No.

Robyne: There was no mediocre choreography. There was no good choreography. It was all great, but some of it was so otherworldly in its quality and beauty. That is the image we should have been left with, was THAT final number and then, AND THEN the show ends and everybody is on their feet because, it was so moving that I, I was almost brought to tears.

Wesley: Because Company XIV also is based off of Louis XIV, that’s where they get their name from, and I think that would have also lent itself to the company’s mission, the company’s foundation, to end on that note. 

Robyne: To not only end on that note but to have the aerial work above the party, what better way to have physically staged the party so that everyone was looking up at them? If you don’t have a balcony put them in the air and the image of the craned neck of everyone dancing in this painful position to see would give such a physical adaptation of envy and jealousy and lust, that if felt like a very obvious choice.

Wesley: Right. But that’s just to say that this thing sparked our imagination a bit. There was also, in Act III you have the challenge of The Step-Sisters for The Prince. And, once again, both were great, but there was one of them in particular, and I hate to say that because it’s not that –

Robyne: Brett Umlauf’s –

Wesley: Brett Umlauf’s vocal prowess, her capabilities as a singer, was sublime. That is unqualified statement. 

Robyne: The operatic number there was great, however, when that number is second to, and is intended to upstage, Marcy Richardson, on a pole dancing pole mounted to a deconstructed carousel, held down by the male performers, while she was pole dancing and singing French opera – there was almost nothing more impressive in this show than that. 

Wesley: And it wasn’t her talent itself, it was the fact that they added something to it; the fact that she was upside down, singing French opera. It wasn’t that the talent was better, it’s just that when you add something more, to that extent, it feels like the logical choice, THAT was the one-upmanship.

Robyne: Right.

Wesley: That was her going, “Ha Ha, you think you’ve won. But I’m gonna do it upside down, on a pole, in a split.”

Robyne: Agreed

Wesley: I will repeat that. Upside down, on a pole, in a split, singing opera.

Robyne: WELL. Singing opera Well. Hitting notes that … I could never … It was incredible.

Wesley: I don’t know the last time I’ve seen something that astonishing.

Robyne: And again, we are describing this and it sounds like stunt, and it is, but in this world, in this one-upsmanship, in this magical world where Cinderella is given wings by her stepsisters and put in a cage, in THIS world, it made perfect sense, and–

Wesley: -you welcome it. You absolutely welcome every breath that they took and that cage work –

35:00

Robyne: Austin McCormick’s sound design was wonderful. The singing of Royals in French, the Fairy Godmother’s song which I, it slips my mind at the moment, (James Young, Dark Star) they were all wonderful choices. But there was … there is an art to the creation of practical sounds on stage and one of the noises I absolutely love is the sound of bird wings on metal cage. I don’t know why. But that is such a textural sensory, and giving us that sound in this, the literal trapping of a Dove in a cage, representing Cinderella and having the Godmother save her, was extraordinary.

Wesley: So one aspect of this performance that I did miss, cause I saw them in their previous space across from the Public Theater doing Nutcracker Rouge, and one of the aspects of Nutcracker Rouge and that space that I preferred was you had a sense that the entire experience from walking in the door was under the artists’ control. And when you walk through the bar to this back hallway, you really got a sense of being transported from beginning to end. I’m sure they’re still finding their footing in the Minetta Lane Theatre; however, there were points inside of the space itself that it felt like the Minetta Lane Theatre hosting this show rather than that sort-of Sleep No More, this is Their Space.  

Robyne: Where the door is a portal to a new world.

Wesley: Exactly.

Robyne: Yeah.

Wesley: I was looking for that Natasha, Pierre (and the Great Comet of 1812), and also, what I got from them last time, which was, from beginning to end, inside their world, you are under their command and you are invited into their home. Rather, here, at times, I’m sure, this is their first performance in this space, this is the premiere of Cinderella, so there will be some adjusting to this space; however it is much larger and I’m sure that there are certain aspects of it that they don’t have the ability to give to it the same level of detail that they do to the stage.

Also, an integral part of Nutcracker Rouge was audience interaction and given the size of the space, given that they could no longer just walk off the stage and be among the people, but have to walk down a set of stairs off the rose lip. The audience interaction, there was immediacy, but the direct interaction was a very rare aspect to this performance. And simply given the talent, given the amount of personality most of these performers had, I would have appreciated more direct contact with the audience.

Robyne: And it could have been something as simple as The Step-Mother handing out flowers for the audience to toss at her daughters after they finished performing. That kind of almost gimmicky interaction would have worked so wonderfully in this production and would have just, JUST made that transportation, just brought us into this world that little bit more and would have been wonderful. 

            My biggest issue, over all, would have to be the ending. 

Wesley: Yes.

***SPOILERS***

Robyne: And Spoilers here *I completely understand, intellectually, the desire to alter the ending of Cinderella to have The Dream end. I felt that it was supported by the concept; I felt the design work supported that kind of broken, bare bones, dismay. Desolation was abound throughout the design. I just simply felt betrayed at the end of the show. It was handled well, it was blunt, I just think it could have been further articulated so it wasn’t so rough on the audience. And we should have been given more of a primer that this dream COULD not been real. It just felt so sudden and almost painful and I’m sure that was part of the intent but I didn’t enjoy that pain. *

Wesley: Furthermore, unlike Nutcracker Rouge, where throughout the performance you watch Clara go inside of this dream world of the Nutcracker, into this graden of earthly delights, as she discovers sensuality and sexuality, until the end when she does this beautiful Pas de Deux, this had no through-line of burlesque developing into this world. If we’d entered and we were in the real world and then the world of burlesque brings her into this dream of Cinderella, that could be one way of seeing it; but when it’s just the burlesque the whole way through and at the end there’s this very depressing coda regarding her being sent back to her abusive mother – that’s the other difference, Nutcracker ends with her waking from the dream but she’s going back t a fine life, when Cinderella wakes up, she’s going back to her abusive mother and dead father. 

40:00

Robyne: Well, I don’t even know if she went back to them, I’m, it just felt like reality broke. As all of the other performers switched out of their characters and started striping the stage, she was left alone and abandoned. And I got the sense that this is what he was going for, was that this was all just a dream in her head that she had had that night after, I think in the original story she picks out lentils. She does this thing and she falls asleep and then in this version I guess the Fairy Godmother comes to her in her dream and she wakes up from that dream and is back in that world. But it felt even worse than that; it felt like she woke up in a war-torn country alone. And I did not understand.

Wesley: It was difficult to enjoy their intent.

Robyne: Yes. Which was made so much more acute by how gorgeous and detailed and warm and loving the rest of the world was. That champagne feel and then to be left with –

Wesley: -this hangover.

Robyne: Not even that hangover, the sour, tart, acidic bile of that stark reality.

Wesley: And that’s not to say this ruined the evening, that’s not to say we couldn’t –

Robyne: By no means did we walk out of this theater completely bemoaning that ending, it was a thirty second tip on the rest of this production that –

Wesley: I just didn’t feel that I needed.

Robyne: Nor did I.

***END SPOILERS***

Wesley: I personally would love to see them come out with a CD once they’ve finished their next two performances using the music of these performances. The music is always beautiful. They use some classical, such as Arvo Pärt, Spiegel im Spiegel, they do revamps of new pieces like Royals in French; I would love to see that happen. And I look forward to seeing them really taking over the Minetta Lane Theatre and making it entirely their own.

Robyne: I am so looking forward to Nutcracker Rouge and Snow White.

Wesley: I say this without any … I check my hyperbole, Austin McCormick is one of the best visionaries I can think of in the downtown theater scene. I can’t think of anybody who has truly created a singular vision and taken over a space to create it, and with such level of detail and craftsmanship. There is a dedication and a love to this world he is making, that I don’t know exists elsewhere. This is a unique theatrical experience perhaps in the country, but definitely in New York, and I would love to see this become a permanent staple of New York.

Robyne: So would I.

Wesley: So I guess the final question is: Is it worth the $40-$100 priced ticket?

Robyne: Absolutely. More so than many Broadway shows I’ve seen recently. The quality of performance, the quality of talent, the amount of time you get in this world, is so worth the ticket price. I full heartedly recommend seeing this show.

Wesley: The tickets could cost twice as much and I’d be saying these words, “Pay and go se it.” This is dance at it’s finest and this is theater craftsmanship better than most that you will see.

Robyne: Cinderella runs until November 15th at The Minetta Lane Theatre. You can find tickets at TicketMaster.com or CompanyXIV.com. As always, you can join in on the conversation at Obstructed-view.com on Facebook at facebook.com/ObstructedViewPodcast, on Twitter, Soundcloud, or Tumblr, or email us at [email protected]. This is Robyne.

Wesley: And Wesley.

Robyne: And Remember.

Wesley: Never be a Wallflower.

[All images taken from Company XIV's Instagram feed]

Wesley: Hi, I’m Wesley.

Robyne: and I’m Robyne.

Wesley: and this is Obstructed View. 

Robyne: Today we’ll be discussing A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented by the Pearl Theatre Company and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.

Wesley:  For those of you who don't know the play, we've added a link to the plot summary as well as a performance. This particular production by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, used only five performers to tell the whole story. Those Performers are Mark Bedard, Sean McNall, Jason O'Connell, Joey Parson, and Nance Williamson. 

Robyne: We're gonna start off today discussing design. Our scenic designer was John McDermott, our costume designer was Jessica Wegener Shay, our lighting design was by Eric Southern, and sound design by Mikhail Fiksel. Wesley why don't you start us off?

Wesley: The design work was very bare and sparse in terms of the scenic design. You got to see the back wall of the theater, and the stage was bare of any scenic element.

Robyne: I found the scenic design to not quite be minimalist but barren.

Wesley: The scenic design really tried to fight for the empty space sort of feel and the groundwork, the stage was covered with a bunch of pebbles-

Robyne: or sand.

Wesley: and there was neon tape, multicolored neon tape placed around the set. And hanging from the rafters in the upstage area, was a blue amorphous curtain like thing -

Robyne: Yeah, it took me a while, but I really fell for the scenic design with the exception of that hanging back material, which I didn’t really see a purpose in, other than as a place for them to light. I really liked the bareness of the stage with the concept they were going for, at the same time I didn’t like the concept they went for.

Wesley: Fair. I mean for me, the bareness of the stage made sense. I liked actually almost the entirety of the design on principal when I walked into the theater.

Robyne: Yeah.

Wesley: When I sat down I was excited for the performance we were about to see. I don’t think that the set elements necessarily meshed with the performers and the work they were doing on the same level. I think they were both well done but I didn’t see a unification of the two aesthetics.

Robyne: Yeah, I really felt that there was no cohesion between the designs. I got the sense that the lighting, costume, and scenic, were all at least aiming for the same world, but not all in the same realm, if that makes sense, at least product wise. Design-wise, they may have all been on the same page. But the sound design, it was very barren, not in the same sense that the stage was, it was very lacking. There was not a lot of it. A lot of the sound was created by the performers. Which I get, but the choices that were made in the intermission, pre-music, and post show were all very non-cohesive.

Wesley: And I do think a lot of that is based off of what I was reading the pearl theatre’s dramaturge about midsummer, which was that this is a dream world where times collide. It’s sort of like from The Frogs “The setting, Ancient Athens, the time, The Present Day.” That sort of dream sense you have when you walk into your house, and for some reason, you know it’s France.  And I think they’re trying to get that sort of disjointed feel, however, I think that the design work really spoke for the directorial concept, but it didn’t really add much to the conversation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Robyne: Yeah, I just didn’t feel that the Dream aesthetic meshed. I didn’t feel as if I was in a dream. Somewhere between the - I’m really sorry Jessica, I hated those costumes, the jumpsuits with the neon strips, seemed really out of place and only there to be utilized by the lighting designer’s use of the neon lights, the black lights, which were fine every once and again but that’s how they communicated that magic was being done and that felt really kitschy and unstylized, to me, it felt sophomoric really, in it’s “NOW we’re doing magic” feel to it.

Wesley: So, I think that this production takes after the Peter Brook 1970’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream that came to New York City. If you don’t know the Peter Brook production, it was a legendary production in which he put all the actor’s inside of this white box set and using as minimal use of design techniques as possible, told the whole story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And a lot of directors since then have taken on Peter Brook’s sort of minimalist aesthetic and deconstructed story telling to create this “Theatre is Magic” kind of feel. The problem is I don’t feel as though the aesthetic, especially in the neon, with the jumpsuits, with the costumes, were brought to the present day. They felt very 1980s, very 1970s, and sort of what post apocalyptic was suppose to feel like in 1983.

5:00

Robyne: It really felt to me like a hip-hop 80s artist experiment with neons and black lights. And I harp on that in the lighting design because there were moments in that lighting design that were absolutely gorgeous. For the most part, the lighting was fantastic, there were two or three really distinct moments, in the getting lost in the woods scene, -

Wesley: Loved it, yeah.

Robyne: - that were gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. And then it just felt like, I almost want to blame the director, Eric Tucker, for these moments of ‘and then I need this to happen,’ and so we had a flash of that neon magic, that was so unnecessary, and could have been conveyed in such a better manner.

Wesley: The moments of lighting design that were really articulate about the world these characters are going through were incredible; especially this one scene, as you said, where they’re lost in the woods and everything goes dark, and we just get side lighting and every once in a while they pop up and you see their face then they disappear. It was beautiful. Once again, much like the scenic design, I thought the lighting design was, on it’s own merit, incredible. I enjoyed the neon, I enjoyed those moments of magic. I think a lot of power was given to those magically moments. Most people do Midsummer just for the mechanicals nowadays because they are hilarious and it’s really easy to get involved with them. It was nice of them to makes us care about the plight of Titania, the plight of Oberon, and to put that as sort of ethereal nature into their lighting design. However, there were a couple of choices that felt purely aesthetic for me and that didn’t articulate this world as well as others – the couple bars of neon on the back wall that didn’t transport me the way that when everything went dark as they’re lost in the woods, as you were talking about, that was a transportive moment.

Robyne: Absolutely.

Wesley: Even when Puck took the lights away, that was a moment of theater magic, for lack of a better term.

Robyne: Absolutely, and then you had things like the natural sound of them running over that sandy pebble pit that really, in the darkness, gave you that sense of loss and confusion that was amazing.

Wesley: There were just points that really felt as though they were painting, rather than producing a production of Midsummer.

Robyne: There was a lot of concept put ONTO this production rather than concept drawn FROM this production.

Wesley: The only point that never really meshed for me was the, and I’m once again sorry Jessica, but those costumes just baffled me as to how they fit in this world with these performers. Unless these costumes were suppose to be a commentary on 1980s underground theater troupes, which they kind of got to at the end with the mechanicals play and this sort of self-referential jab. But with how streamlined and how finished and how developed everything else was, to be Midsummer, those remained lagging in unfulfilled concept.

Robyne: As we mentioned before, I loved all of the performers.

Wesley: Yeah.

Robyne: And it really felt like there were two different worlds. I said to Wesley as soon as we stepped out that this production definitely proves that you can do Midsummer with five people; I just don’t know why you would, if you can get a full cast. That being said, there were some phenomenal performances.

Wesley: So using this cast of five, their breakdown was – Sean McNall playing Theseus, Peter Quince, and Demetrius, Jason O’Connell playing Puck, Bottom, and Aegeus, Nance Williamson playing Hippolyta, Helena, a fairy, Robin Starveling, and half of Snug the Joiner, Joey Parsons playing Hermia, Titania, and Tom Snout, and Mark Bedard playing Lysander, Oberon, Francis Flute, and Snug the Joiner.

Robyne: My main issue with the performances I believe comes from the direction, that there was a lot of gross generalization and stereotypical, archetypal performance for minor characters to distinguish them in the on-stage transitions that happen that could have been much more easily conveyed through costumes. 

Wesley: Often what happens with double casting much less quadruple or even more casting is that you get broad generalizations in characterization. You don’t really get as much nuance and personality from each of these characters because they’re doing quick changes in front of you and that you need to be able to identify that these are new people every time. It’s fun story telling very often; there are a few times it doesn’t come fully to fruition.

            I would say everyone in the cast has at least one character they were able to knock out of the park.

Robyne: Absolutely. Sean McNall’s Theseus was great.

Wesley: Yeah. I really think that Jason O’Connell’s Bottom, especially during Bottom’s Dream was beautiful.

10:00

Robyne: That is one of the best, if not THE best, performances of Bottom’s Dream I have ever seen. 

Wesley: Yeah, it really grounded that character, which was needed by that point in time.

            Nance Williamson, she was a lot of fun in a lot of things. I’m trying to think of what I preferred her in, but I think just her variety really spoke for her. Going from Hippolyta to Helena to Robin Starveling, though I really like her emotional grounding of Helena, personally. 

Robyne: And the age difference really brought an interesting texture to that casting of the four lovers.

Wesley: Yeah, so, the whole cast was of various ages, of various backgrounds, they don’t -

Robyne: it was an interestingly diverse cast, in a way that I had not expected it to be. Upon the actors initial entrance I felt that it was a very white cast, but in just a very few moments, that disappeared for me. Their variety and diversity came from other aspects of their personages.

Wesley: So also, you have Mark Bedard, who I really enjoyed as Oberon when he was playing with Puck, it really was a good counterbalance there. He was great as Francis Flute and Thisbe, with his little voice, I mean, that was a lot of fun for me. 

Robyne: I really liked him as Thisbe; I did not care for him as Francis Flute.

Wesley: Joey Parsons playing Hermia, Titania, and Tom Snout – I can’t even point out which one was supposed to be the best because they were all so great.

Robyne: This was Joey Parson’s show.

Wesley: Yeah

Robyne: She stole it.

Wesley: To be fair, she really meshed well with the mechanicals, she meshed well in the fairy world, not a scene stealer by any account; but her Titania was fantastic. It was so well formed.

Robyne: Joey really brought out the best in her fellow cast, which is fantastic to see.

Wesley: And it’s amazing that I was able to believe her as both the fan girl turned lover in Tom Snout, but at the same time this frightening and incredible magisterial Queen of the fairy world.

Robyne: She gave Titania a real depth in not only conveying this thousands-year-old Queen of these immortal beings that have magic, but she at a moment broke when Bottom made a joke, and she giggled at him, and that is almost something you never see. You never see that real softness, it’s usually just a lust for Bottom, rather than the Love-in-Idleness that it’s suppose to be; and Joey really brought that out in this production.    

Wesley:  I believed that she loved him. I believe that she fell for Bottom, not just in a sexual aspect but because she was enamored with him.

Robyne: Yeah. That being said, the Puck-Bottom pairing was hard to swallow at times. Puck is a very high-energy character; if not played more mischievous.  He kind of comes off as just an ass. Bottom can also be played as a very egotistical ass, which he was in this production as well.  But when you have the same actor playing Puck and Bottom, it can really bring out the worst in both those characters. Finding those uniquenesses between the two can be very difficult.

Wesley: Puck in particular, because while Bottom learns something and goes through Bottom’s Dream, and we get this moment of grounding with him that then transports us into the mechanicals play; sure there’s a couple of moments with Puck where he swallows his pride next to Oberon, but I wouldn’t say there’s any real point of learning with the character. He remained the mischievous fairy that he was in the beginning.

Robyne: and while that can be fine in most productions, I didn’t get a real clear sense that Oberon was in charge of Puck, I didn’t see the fear in Puck of Oberon.

Wesley: For me, it was just, they were asking for this particular performance to be too much when they put both Bottom and Puck on him. Those are very high energy, high comedy characters, especially seeing as Jason O’Connell was performing them much like the Genie in Aladdin. Very much the Robin Williams-y, going from impression to impression to impression, which isn’t wrong, it makes sense for Puck, it absolutely makes sense for Puck to be able to do these things. 

Robyne: Especially with this anachronistic concept to it.

Wesley: And to have Bottom play Pyramus like The Godfather.

Robyne: Yeah.

Wesley: Those are fun things to add in. When those things get meshed together they really can overwhelm the humor and overwhelm the subtlety.

One thing that I really did enjoy that sadly began to dissipate near the end of the production was that, when we first entered the fairy world, with Nance Williamson playing the fairy opposite Puck, I got a sense that these were creatures to be feared, and I rarely see that. Fairies are now very often just these pretty figures that go around the stage as an excuse for costumers to show off, and it was nice to see the fairies as something to be feared as part of this pagan world that the forest represents.

15:00

Robyne: The Fay are, from European tradition, these terrifying creatures that live in the woods and play tricks on people, and steal children to eat them, and have their way with humans in the forests. I kind of got the sense for that in the initial interactions between Oberon and Titania that got really lost towards the end of the production.

Wesley: One thing I really want to give them here though is, this is the first production of Midsummer Night’s Dream that I have ever seen in which I cared about the outcome of the Indian child. 

Robyne: Yes.

Wesley: I always forget about the Indian child by the end of the play.

Robyne: Titania and Oberon have a very Martha-and-George relationship where new items tend to become weapons. But Joey Parson’s Titania really brought that emotional value of what that child meant to her and I loved that, that is something that gets completely forgotten about in most productions.

Wesley: And also, Oberon’s apathy – “I’m bored, I want another member of my posse.” But this sort of surprise at the stakes Titania has regarding what this child means to her, it feels new for both of these characters.

Robyne: Yeah.

Wesley: And that was a fun entrance into the world of the fairy kingdom. And I think that that is added to by the fact that we get this disjointed staging where we go from all these different levels of worlds and stakes. That’s one thing that I think the director did very well, I think it was done very much in collaboration with this cast, but the disjointed set up, from going from the lovers to the royalty, to the fairy kingdom, to the mechanicals, you really got a sense of all the different layers in this world combining into one.

Robyne: One of my issues with this production in particular was the first act felt as if it was a tribulation that was necessary to get to the fun of act two, which consisted of the lovers lost in the woods, the righting of Bottom and Titania, and the happy ending of the rude mechanicals and the nobles – which was the funniest I have ever seen that scene done. The gross juxtaposition of the actors judging their other characters performances was wonderful. That really made the show.  

Wesley: Well, also for Midsummer the first act has always been a necessary evil. If you read it, that first act, you like fly through it. There is no fat in that first act, it’s setting everything up to get you into the woods.

Robyne: This just felt particularly trying.

Wesley: Oh, no, it was very laborious and a lot of that had to do with the concept eeking its way into the actors’ position. The first part of the play I was thinking to myself, ‘what is this concept that I’m suppose to be grasping here?’

Robyne: Yes.

Wesley: Rather than really enjoying the play of the actors and what they were doing. Which, I think, that is what made the first part so laborious.

Robyne: Well even that first scene was incredibly trying, where they started and stopped multiple times, with various actors portraying various characters in so many different referential styles. There was a 2001: A Spacy Odyssey entrance, in which they were all apes, and there was a southern accented entrance and we got that it was all referential, but it just set us on a very bad path for the rest of the production

Wesley: Right and also for the fact that it was never brought up again really. There was a couple of points at intermission and at the end of the play, but there was never any other time in the meat of the piece where that kind of disjointed, cubist, multiple-referential framework was utilized. Now we got a lot of different forms, we got a lot of anachronisms, which are fine, but never on that level, so it really changed expectations for what was the reality of the piece we were going to see.

Robyne: Right it started me off believing I was going to see a cocaine fueled, nightmarish, post-modern, Generation X, production and that’s not at all what we saw.

Wesley: No. Now I do want to get back to the mechanicals and what you were saying about their scene. The mechanicals scene was hilarious, and a lot of that came from, and I do agree this is the best I’ve sen this dynamic used, between the nobles watching the work and the mechanicals performing the work. There were a lot of things that made the mechanicals a lot of fun, in particular their sort of self-referential, self-mocking sense of, “This is the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival coming to perform for the nobles. And it’s like change, change, change, each of them doing a real grotesque form of doing what they’d spent the whole playing doing, to tell this story.

            Throughout the whole play though, there was an added sort of sub-plot between Bottom and Joey Parson’s Tom Snout, who plays wall, where they slowly come to love each other or they become enraptured with each other.

20:00

Robyne: Where, where she becomes enraptured with him and he kind of just goes for it after he’s had the realization that he is lonely.

Wesley: He is lonely but also she looks a lot like Titania.

Robyne: Oh. Yeah.

Wesley: So they added that in. And it’s difficult to add something like that in to a Shakespeare play and help it feel natural and make you feel excited about it. And I felt so excited for them when they started making out on the stage. And I was really enjoying that moment, a lot because I’d learned to love those two actors in those characters.

Robyne: Right, my biggest issue, and maybe it’s there as a juxtaposition was the really ridiculous gay sex jokes that were out in with the whole Wall thing, talking and kissing through the wall, which was a guys crotch, it was so unnecessary.

Wesley: And it didn’t match the levels that the rest of their staging met.  

Robyne: There were a number of times where we mixed high-brow with low-brow in this production and it made the low-brow sound so hollow because it wasn’t done well.

Wesley: Yeah, there were a lot of gay jokes. There were a lot of poor interactions with the audience. There were a lot of anachronisms that -

Robyne: There was that whole sex scene between Titania and Bottom that was not necessary.

Wesley: It really felt desperate.

Robyne: And Grotesque.

Wesley: And it didn’t match what I think Titania felt for Bottom in what we saw in the scenes before.

Robyne: yeah, and I’m all for a good Bacchanal but that, again, just rang hollow. 

Wesley: It seemed like performers trying to make people excited about Shakespeare by appealing to the lowest common denominator, which happens a lot in New York right now. It happens a lot in America right now.

Robyne: I got the impression that we were suppose to excuse them for being rude mechanicals, but they didn’t earn that because of their treatment of the language and because of their level of skill was too high. They were not rude mechanicals in the least; they were some wonderful performers.

Wesley: If this was suppose to have been possessing them to tell this story, as I think might have been the intention by that sort of epilogue

Robyne: Right. There was a time warp epilogue at the end of the piece. After all the nobles retire to bed at midnight, the play rewinds for a second just to jump to the rude mechanicals rehearsing in the forest and Puck poseses them to deliver his final monologue, “if we be friends…” 

Wesley: “Robin will restore amends.” And then we all applaud and they look stunned at us as if they didn’t know they were performing for an audience this whole time. The difficulty with this is the difficulty with nearly any meta-performance which is, you start to then piece apart, “wait,  if this was Puck the whole time, why was Puck using this poetic language? Why was Puck needing this performance to be told? How was this fun for Puck? What was Puck doing?” A lot of cracks came out of the plaster using this framework of the possessed performers.

Robyne: And I felt that it was Eric Tucker just not being able to help himself with the direction. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone. He couldn’t trust that the production was doing what it was supposed to do.

Wesley: If they would have ended with the mechanicals scene going then to Puck, I would have been happy for the whole cast then deliver Puck’s monologue. But if they would have ended with that sort of simplicity, it would have been a very different feeling leaving the play. But instead, I left a little baffled, and more irritated than curious. 

Robyne: Yeah, because I loved the ending up until that point and then they finished on that note and I left wondering why. Why? Why? Why did that have to happen?

Wesley: And it didn’t excite me in the same way that the performes did.

Robyne: And I can’t find a conceptual defense for it.

Wesley: No, cause getting us in to intermission, they walked backwards off the set, and then getting us in to act two, they did the same exact thing, walking forward with some more wheel grinding and a lot of it was very impressive in terms of performance.

Robyne: yeah, I’m sure that if you had recorded Bottom’s delivery and played it backwards it would be English.

Wesley: It would be, probably, perfect verse, but-

Robyne: It just didn’t need to exist.

Wesley: The rest of it was so strong. The poetry was so strong. And Nance Williamson’s Helena – her delivery of sorrow, trying to chase after Demetrius was enough.

Robyne: Yeah.

Wesley: The performers put so much care into telling A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Eric Tucker’s concept became too much for it.

Robyne: Which is not to say that his direction was terrible.

Wesley: No.

Robyne: There were moments where, while I did not at all care for what was happening on stage, I really appreciate how structured the, would you say post modern?

Wesley: Oh yeah.

Robyne: -movement styles were. The creation of Bottom and Bottom being completely lost while bound by his fellow actors – the actual, physical, human actors in this production not the actors in the production of Pyramus and Thisbe – was wonderful.

25:00

His sense of physicality as an ass, were wonderful. There were moments of the players leaving Athens in an elevator singing “Girl from Impanema,” that worked really well for me. And Just confused me as to why the other anachronistic pieces were not cut when they didn’t work and if they were recognized as not working.

Wesley: This must have been very much devised.  I can’t imagine that this was just a directing coming in going, “I know exactly how this is going to be staged, I know exactly what you all are going to be doing.” This clearly speaks well for collaborative theater. To have talented, very well seasoned actors playing and this director then parsing out what goes where and how best to tell the story.

            Those moments, they were cinematic moments with sharp cuts between places – with us being above people, and now below people, and now to the side of people – that were seamless and fun. The problem was when they got overshadowed by a looming concept.

Robyne: And to me, directors are responsible for the end performances and it should have been up to him or a producer to have helped clean up those performances, to wipe away some of the stereotypical, archetypal mannerisms and vocal choices; unless that was the initial design, and then to work them further in. And there were things that just really irked me, like Demetrius’s Spanish. Not only his Spanish accent but his actual speaking of Spanish felt completely put on to this production.  Egius’s homosexuality felt put on to this production. And I did not care for Snug the Joiner being this weird conjoined twin ‘Other’ thing.

Wesley: So for me, Demetrius’s Spanish was enjoyable and made sense for the character, it didn’t seem so put upon. Egius’s homosexuality was just so broad, so unnecessary and didn’t really make sense for the character, I don’t really know howthey got to point B there. I loved Snug the Joiner. I laughed so hard. Just given how this is a world of such mania they’ve made, to have this sort of monster zombie come out, out of nowhere, it made no sense, and I thought it was hilarious. Especially given, always going back to her, Joey Parson’s reaction of “Oh God!”  Every time, with terror. I mean, it just makes me laugh, every time. There was some diminishing returns there by the time we got to the final mechanicals’ scene. But we didn’t need that comedy adding in.

Robyne: So Wesley, any other thoughts?

Wesley: I think in general this is a, off/on production that stars some very incredible performances.

Robyne: I completely agree. A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs at the Pearl Theater until October 31st. Wesley, my question is – Is the show worth the $65 ticket for non-members?

Wesley: It is if you really enjoy seeing new versions of Shakespeare, but if your interests go anywhere beyond that I would say this is one to miss.

Robyne: I would be very pleased if I saw this production at a $20 ticket.

Wesley: Yeah, at La Mama. However, given that price, if you have the stakes to see deconstructed Shakespeare, or have made a hobby of seeing Midsummer or Shakespeare performances, this is one probably not to be missed.

We hope you enjoy the podcast and that you will share your thoughts with us.

Robyne: As always, you can find us and join the conversation on facebook at facebook.com/ObstructedViewPodcast, on twitter @Obstructed_View, on soundcloud at soundcloud.com/obstructedview, on tumblr obstructedviewpodcast.tumblr.com, or at Obstructed-view.com

Wesley: Special Thanks today goes out Ari Edelson, Alyssa Jenette, and Julian Fleisher for your love and support. This is Wesley.

Robyne: And Robyne,

Wesley: And remember,

Robyne: Dream the Impossible Dream.

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