Titania in her bower in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Right now Hub audiences have the unusual chance to take in the second of two genius-on-genius Midsummer Night's Dream mash-ups: after Boston Ballet's splendid mounting of Balanchine's version last month, we can now savor Benjamin Britten's gorgeous response to the same masterpiece at Boston Lyric Opera (through this weekend at the Schubert).

It's pretty much agreed that both these derivative works are masterpieces in their own rights - and what's more, they serve as conceptual bookends for their expansive source. Balanchine stresses the romance and structure of Shakespeare's mother of all romantic comedies (and all but ignores its goofy "mechanicals"); Britten, meanwhile, emphasizes the work's infinite variety rather than its unity - musically, he conjures a different sound-garden, in fact, for each "cast" of characters.  And surprisingly he punches up the comedy, particularly the baggy-pants stuff; indeed the mechanicals are all but center-stage much of the time, and their travesty of the "tragedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe becomes the opera's hilarious climax.

It's here that the BLO soars to the same brilliant level it achieved in recent productions of Agrippina and The Emperor of Atlantis (it occurs to me that comedy may be their strong suit). But at first it seems director Tazewell Thompson and set designer John Conklin are a little lost in the woods themselves, and it takes the production a long time - indeed, the entire first act - to come together. The singing, however, is first-rate throughout, and Britten's instrumental writing is so lustrous that classical fans may not mind the conceptual confusion unfolding on stage.

No doubt Thompson and Conklin thought they were simply taking a note from Britten's own approach: just as the composer devised individual sound-scapes for Midsummer's different characters, so Conklin and Thompson seem to have concocted a separate look for each as well.  (Perhaps they also think that the "contradictions, confusions, and disguises" that afflict the play's characters should afflict the audience, too.)  Thus the lovers are roughly Edwardian, while Oberon and Titania seem more historic and fanciful; meanwhile the fairies look to be modeled on the Boy Scouts.  Odder still are the many design gambits Conklin offers and then discards: the general mood is mod and coolly geometric, but sometimes the furniture grows or shrinks like decor from Alice in Wonderland, and when the mechanicals wander through the forest, the trees are labeled "TREES" (apparently because Bottom and his crew are so literal-minded).  The moon remains an organizing motif, at least - but when things grow more surreal after Bottom's transformation, even it gets tricked out with a Man Ray photograph - again, just in case we don't "get it." 

A few of the contradictions and confusions in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo(s) by Erik Jacobs.

These ideas aren't "wrong," exactly, it's just that they keep calling attention to themselves, and begin to seem too clever by half - and that makes the opera feel disjointed and slightly incoherent, when actually Shakespeare's complex text and Britten's delicately ambiguous music are both highly unified beneath their surface effects.  (For the record, the opera's underlying style is something like Purcell gone modern - and it's worth noting that this is a rare case in which a Shakespearean opera is based on Shakespeare's own text, a stunning achievement in and of itself.)  There are some lovely vocals to savor, from the sweet countertenor of John Gaston's Oberon to Nadine Sierra's languidly plush turn as Titania, to Andrew Shore's robustly rendered bully of a Bottom.  And the children of the PALS Children's Chorus charmed whenever they sang.  Still, the performances somehow couldn't make much headway against a persistent sense of conceptual drift; and it didn't help that stage director Thompson and new music director David Angus both favored a very measured pace - which only gave us plenty of time to wonder what, exactly, they were getting at.

A heartbroken Thisbe (Matthew DiBattista) mourns the fallen Pyramus (Andrew Shore).

Luckily, things turned a corner at intermission; Britten's music gathers more dramatic momentum, and Conklin settled on a design motif, and the lovers got a wonderfully punchy scene to strut their stuff (that's Chad A. Johnson, Heather Johnson, Susanna Phillips, and the clarion-voiced Matthew Worth, above).  Best of all, the mechanicals did a boffo job with "Pyramus and Thisbe."  It's a little surprising to realize that Shakespeare actually invented "camp" some four hundred years ago with this little skit (it even includes what may be the stage's first drag queen), but Britten understood its true nature all too well, and offers up a hilarious parody of classic bel canto opera, complete with a mad scene out of Lucia di Lammermoor (above left), in which Lucia is a brawny lad with a mop on his head (played originally by Britten's lover/librettist, Peter Pears).   Here the whole sequence was pure perfection - balancing beautifully Shakespeare's point about perspective being everything in romance with his deeper affection for the faith that makes all romantic (and artistic) feeling possible.  And thus somehow Britten and Boston Lyric Opera brought off the depth of this great work as few theatrical productions do, making this Midsummer something of a dream in the end.

Photo above and masthead by Gene Schiavone.

It would be difficult to overestimate the pleasure given by Boston Ballet's current revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream (through this weekend at the Opera House). The dance represents, of course, the intersection of two geniuses - Shakespeare, probably the greatest artist of all time, and Balanchine, the choreographer who most certainly deserves a place in the Bard's pantheon of talent.  Not that Balanchine's ballet encompasses the full breadth of Midsummer - in fact, it doesn't even attempt to treat the whole play;  Mr. B (as he has become known) all but races through the plot, and leaves out whole chunks of Shakespearean theme and structure (don't expect, for instance, to see anything danced regarding the lover, the lunatic, and the poet, much less the "tragedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe).

No, as I said, this is a kind of intersection, not an interpretation; but Balanchine understands much of Midsummer, and brings to his ballet, almost without thinking, something of Shakespeare's own depth and nobility.  We don't like that word anymore, of course - "nobility."  Which is our loss, because it expresses something Shakespeare believed in, and which Balanchine simply takes as a matter of course.  Of course ballet elevates human experience, his every move tells us; of course even a flawed character, or society (or dream) has an inherent nobility to be discovered and appreciated.  Of course, of course.

Thus the centerpiece of Balanchine's Midsummer corresponds to one of his central concerns - the expression of romantic harmony through civilized ceremony. Perhaps because he's so devoted to ceremony, Mr. B disdains pantomime - hence the headlong dash through some sequences (like the arrival of the mechanicals in the forest); if he can't conjure a full dance from a scene, Balanchine just sketches it in, with an implied nod along the lines of "You remember this part, right? Right!".

So if for some reason you're not familiar with the play, it may be a good idea to check it out before going, so you're not wondering things like "What's with the donkey head?" Although frankly, even memories from a high school production might be all you need - or maybe even just the précis I overheard in the lobby from one young patron, which ran, "There are these people in the forest who are like in love with the wrong person, okay? And they meet these fairies, and you know stuff happens, and everybody ends up in love with the right person, and then they all get married."

Good enough for me! Although I have to say much of the most individualized dancing and acting came from those four confused young lovers - on opening night essayed by company stars Kathleen Breen Combes and Yury Yanowsky (now a married couple) as the warring Helena and Demetrius, and Erica Cornejo and Pavel Gurevich as the besotted Hermia and Lysander. These were four utterly specific performances in terms of emotion realized as movement, all set off by brilliant comic timing (but then the Ballet is full of terrific comedians).

Photo by Eric Antoniou

The lead fairies were perhaps slightly less compelling - it was great to see Lorna Feijóo return to the spotlight as Titania (with her peerless technique utterly secure), but she lacked a certain vixenish spark in her opening war with Oberon (the sinuously elegant John Lam, both at top), and she was indifferently partnered in her solo by the young Lorin Mathis. Elsewhere, however, fairyland was indeed aglitter with magic - as Balanchine's fluttering butterflies, the kids wrangled by ballet mistress Melanie Atkins were utterly charming (and in perfect synch, at left), and Jeffrey Cirio, though perhaps lacking a genuinely devilish streak - despite sprouting a tiny pair of horns - was nevertheless dazzlingly fleet of foot as Puck (see masthead), and with his happy élan had the audience in the palm of his hand all night.

There are a lot of great performances to mention here, however - that's the downside of being a reviewer when the Ballet's bench has become as deep as it is now! Robert Kretz, who has toiled largely in the background in previous seasons, struck just the right innocently earthy notes as Bottom (particularly while preferring provender to Titania). And Lia Cirio made a buoyantly darting huntress of Hippolyta, partnered with appropriately understated confidence by Bo Busby. But probably the most sublime dancing of the night came from Larissa Ponomarenko and James Whiteside, as the avatars of Balanchine's lengthy second-act divertissement.

This wouldn't be a Balanchine ballet without an enormous work for the corps at the climax, and Midsummer sports a doozy that's geometrically intricate even by Mr. B's heady standards. Here it was brought off with sparkling precision, however, which only set off Ponomarenko and Whiteside's sweetly simple pas de deux (just as it was meant to be). The keynote of their coupling is sympathetic attention - the moves in of themselves are only impressive as subtle call-and-response - a quality which these two dancers by now seem to have in their bones.

Then came that enchanting moment when the court dissolves back into the forest - an effect even more dazzling than usual on the exquisite new set the Ballet had borrowed from La Scala (which was simpler but more sophisticated than the design of previous productions). And when Balanchine's butterflies came back as fireflies, you heard one of those soft, unconscious sighs of pleasure rise from the audience that are almost more magical than anything occurring on the stage.

Oh and did I mention this production actually represents the intersection of three geniuses, not just two? For let's not forget Felix Mendelssohn, whose suite of incidental music (largely written when he was just seventeen) has long since become a classic in its own right; here it was skillfully extended to include excerpts from his Athalia Overture and String Sinfonia No. 9 (written when he was all of fourteen). Down in the pit, the Ballet's orchestra seemed a little uncertain of Mendelssohn's familiar opening notes, but soon, under the baton of Jonathan McPhee, they had settled into a sweetly vigorous interpretation as memorable as the rest of this ravishing production.

The Dream is over, we'll have to carry on . . .

Good-bye to all that - Henry Fuseli's vision of Midsummer.

I suppose no Shakespearean text has been as brutally raped by the academy as A Midsummer Night's Dream. Once a cherished vision of the commingled absurdity and transcendence of romantic love, it's now basically a kind of longform video on some pop-academic version of Pornhub - bound and shackled by the likes of Jan Kott, with a rubber ball in its mouth courtesy of Michel Foucault. Once, it inspired Mendelssohn; now, it's a career vehicle for Diane Paulus, our reverse-incarnation of the Puritanical Nahum Tate. Oh, what a falling off was there!

Still, I suppose that's life - but if you want some sense of how the professoriat is poisoning the springs of our culture, look no further than the bizarre level of approval accorded The Donkey Show. One expects, of course, the press to praise the latest from Harvard, whatever it may be - that's the memo the editors don't even have to send; and I'm well aware our cash-strapped "greatest university" needs a new revenue stream, so I have no problem with it opening a topless bar. Desperate times, desperate measures, etc.; and hey, I've spent Saturday night in Providence, too. But when Harvard pretends its topless bar is presenting "Shakespeare" - well, that's where I draw the line.

Not that anyone else does. Consider the reviews for the Actors' Shakespeare Project's A Midsummer Night's Dream (which is actually pretty tame by the standards of the postmodern syllabus). It moves the Globe's Don Aucoin to opine, for instance, that Diane Paulus "does not hold a monopoly on creative interpretations of the Bard," and that the ASP production is "another fun and creative interpretation." Well, good for them! But notice the stupidity creep latent in those lines: The Donkey Show is now the standard by which other productions are judged. Harvard has just succeeded in dumbing us down another notch.

But back to the Actors' Shakespeare Project, whose Midsummer is fairly harmless, but not really . . . all that . . . good. It's a little slow and very broad and pretty declamatory (albeit in a postmodern mode), plus its "urban environment" concept feels rote (the DeGrassi kids go to the inner city yet again) and is anyway just an excuse to fill "the woods outside Athens" with various figures from pop culture: Oberon is Keith Richards/Johnny Depp, Titania is Courtney Love (or maybe our local knock-off, Amanda Palmer), her bower is of course a bombed-out car, while Bottom is Donnie Wahlberg . . . sigh. It would have been nice to have been surprised at least once by the production's choices - but then again, how precisely could pop culture be bent to Shakespeare's purposes anyhow? His fairyland provides a psychological odyssey for both his audience and his characters - his lovers emerge from the forest transformed and shaken, their assumptions undermined but their faith confirmed. And how, exactly, could pop, which amplifies the ego but never questions it, ever do that?

But what I mourn most about our current approach to Midsummer is that we've lost all sense of the play's stunningly grand design. This is the play in which Shakespeare truly became Shakespeare - or at least it's the play in which his horizons suddenly exploded, and he realized he could bend just about all of past Western culture to his will, and at the same time produce a template for its future. The Midsummer cast list comes closer to the universal than that of perhaps any other play; it stretches from the mythological (Theseus and Hippolyta) to the fantastic (Puck and Oberon) to the quotidian (the carpenters and weavers of Stratford-on-Avon). The play's social vision is penetratingly astute; its action is one of the most perfectly modeled farces ever constructed. And at the same time it's one of the greatest flights of poetry and one of the deepest meditations on love ever conceived.

But please, before you say it, can we let go of our childish attachment to the supposed sexual sadomasochism latent in the play? Today's Shakespeareans often seem like kids trawling the Internet for the dirty stuff - they know it's in the canon, if only they surf hard enough! Sure, Oberon wants to humiliate Titania - and his reason, her guardianship of her "changeling" boy, is one of those endlessly-suggestive Shakespearean motifs (like Hamlet's madness, or Shylock's pound of flesh) that will defy forever complete analysis. Likewise Egeus wants to control his daughter's sex life (the motivation here is not so hard to parse). But do either of these supposed representatives of the masculine id succeed in their aims? No, they do not, and they certainly don't represent Shakespeare's POV.

The whole play is of course obviously opposed to Egeus, and Oberon's jealous designs are completely undone by Bottom, one of Shakespeare's true innocents and certainly one of his great gallants. Yes, the sweet-natured weaver is translated into an ass, as befits one who lacks all self-awareness - but that very lack allows him to all but ignore his alarming transmogrification, and his confident gap in self-consciousness makes him dazzled but clear-eyed about the fairies (and by extension love itself). And when it comes to sex, this perfect, if furry, gentleman hardly takes advantage of the besotted Titania - indeed, he seems to assume she's some kind of mental patient, and delights in the charming Cobweb and Peaseblossom instead (needless to say, in the Diane Paulus version, he mounts her from behind - probably the greatest crime against Shakespeare the A.R.T. has yet committed). Oberon undoes Bottom's enchantment not because he has succeeded in humiliating Titania (he hasn't), and not even because he has won back his changeling boy, but because her idyll with Bottom forces him to see his own vanity.

Or at least these are the deep, humane lessons that we used to allow the Bard to teach us. Now, however, we insist on cutting him down to our own size; we know better than he does; we don't want to watch his work "grow to something of great constancy." Thus the fairies in the ASP Dream are just urchins from the 'hood, and the play's rhythms are reduced to rap, which of course delights the crunchy Cantabridgians in the audience, but I'm afraid leaves me cold. Bottom and the "mechanicals" are likewise patronized into excuses for parodies of ballet (which actually, via Balanchine, is the only place you can get a glimpse of the real Midsummer anymore), or the A.R.T., or - oh, who knows, and who cares. I mean what can you say when Theseus is styled as Donald Trump and Hippolyta is Pocahontas? There is one lovely idea in the show - the broken TV that fitfully shows images of Titania's lost votress, the mother of her changeling. For a brief moment, something like romance flickers through the theatre. More, please.


Michael Kaye and Maurice Parent toy with "love in idleness."

The surprise is that a few actors do make some headway despite the ongoing car crash of bad ideas. The "young" lovers, although they all look to be about 45, are played by pretty funny and resourceful actors, and their antics in the wood do prove amusing. So hooray for Mara Sidmore, Shelley Bolman, Jennie Israel, and Christopher James Webb! Alas, I didn't particularly care for Michael Kaye's pallid Oberon or Marianna Bassham's rock-chick Titania, but Maurice Parent did make a menacing (perhaps too-menacing) Puck. And Trent Mills occasionally had a good idea as a broader-than-broad Thisbe in what must have been the longest fifth act of this play I've ever seen. But then the final word on this production is that it's utterly self-indulgent - you could drive a semi through half the cues, and Robert Walsh and John Kuntz in particular are prone to stretches of schtick that seem to last for hours.

And I must say these performances almost seemed to me to blur into performances I remember from other shows - because frankly, one A.S.P. show is so much like another. I'm not sure, in fact, that any other local company operates in quite as tight a stylistic straitjacket - and isn't that a bit odd, given the supposed breadth and depth of the playwright in question, and the fact that they're constantly inviting new directors to work with them? Clearly a particularly virulent form of groupthink has set in. So how about it, A.S.P.? How about no more halter tops or cowboy boots for the women, no more 70's-rummage-sale costumes, and no more self-conscious fuss over interracial or cross-gender casting? How about you lose the air quotes, stop trying to be hip, and don't think about "the other," or feminism, or the color bar for just one production? Just try it. See what happens. You might be surprised. And you can count on one thing - the results would be like no Shakespeare production Boston has seen in years.