An Autumnal Tribute to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Anita Louise as Titania, the Fairy Queen

As a long-time theatre buff, I’ve been suffering serious withdrawal symptoms during the pandemic. The few opportunities I’ve had to see actors on stage have been outdoor performances, sometimes awkwardly staged in parking lots. But I did celebrate the end of summer with a Midsummer Night’s Dream in the most magical locale you can imagine. Topanga Canyon’s Theatricum Botanicum was founded in 1973 by the actor Will Geer (Grandpa on TV’s The Waltons). Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Geer had moved his family to the wilds of Topanga to live off the land. Eventually, their domain became an artist’s colony, and the site of an annual repertory season. The playing area is entirely outdoors, and it’s no wonder that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a standard annual offering. Ensconced in surprisingly comfortable seats in a beautifully woodsy glen, you truly feel as though you too are in the middle of a vast forest, communing with fairy creatures.

 (My pleasure in this particular performance was enhanced by the fact that a neighbor’s son, Steven Taub Gordon, had risen from the ranks of the understudies to play one of show’s quartet of lovers, the charmingly addled Lysander.)

 Back when talkies were something new and exciting, Hollywood’s big studios went out of their way to launch prestige projects, including elaborate screen versions of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays. MGM, for instance, staged a 1936 production of Romeo and Juliet, starring members of the studio’s prized acting stable: John Barrymore as Mercutio, Basil Rathbone as Tybalt, Edna May Oliver as Juliet’s nurse. The two young lovers were played by long-in-the-tooth Leslie Howard (age 43) and Norma Shearer (the 34-year-old wife of producer Irving Thalberg). It’s a well-spoken production, but also one that’s stiff and unconvincing in its portrayal of youthful passion.

 Up until now I’d never managed to see the Warner Bros. contribution to the Shakespeare derby. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which had been staged as an early silent film back in 1905, was filmed in 1935 by Austrian stage and screen director Max Reinhardt, who had just fled rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Reinhardt adored spectacle, and the film spends much of its length on musical interludes, featuring woodland creatures (fairies, nymphs, trolls) frolicking in the moonlight to the lush strains of Felix Mendelssohn. Today all those supernatural beings, photographed in shimmering black & white, can get a bit tiresome, with the oodles of fairies (all with long silvery tresses and filmy gowns) seeming not far removed from the stylized routines that made Busby Berkeley famous. Still, Victor Jory (wearing what looks like a crown of twisted twigs) makes a stalwart Oberon, and Anita Louise is a lovely Titania.

 Among the mortal lovers, perennial juvenile Dick Powell plays Lysander as a ready-for-anything college boy, in a performance that has always been much scorned, even by Powell himself. Opposite him is the very young Olivia De Havilland, making her screen debut. They and the two additional star-crossed lovers, Ross Alexander and Jean Muir, are pretty silly, in roles that always require a certain amount of silliness.

 Naturally, it’s the most earth-bound characters who come out best, particularly James Cagney as Bottom the Weaver and the wide-mouthed Joe E. Brown as Flute, who must don a dress to play opposite Bottom in the world’s wackiest performance of the tragic “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Young Mickey Rooney’s antic Puck sounds like a good idea: he was a small, energetic fifteen-year-old who was talented and ready for anything. But Rooney’s hyperactive performance should only be sampled in small doses. After seeing it, you’ll be ready for a Midsummer Night’s snooze.

 

 

"Dunkirk": Britain’s Band of Brothers

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” That’s the beginning of a famous speech in which Shakespeare’s Henry V urges his troops forward. It’s 1415, and the British are invading France, in a series of battles that are part of the Hundred Years’ War. Somewhat later in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the young king – who in the spirit of the times personally leads his men into battle – addresses them, manfully insisting that the odds stacked against them will only make their success more glorious. In what is always called the St. Crispin’s Day speech, Henry waxes philosophical about the long-term fame that awaits his soldiers, then rises to a glorious climax:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .

The valor of English soldiers and their leaders, as displayed in Henry V, has of course always had high appeal for English audiences. That’s why Winston Churchill, in the dark days of World War II, turned to actor/director Laurence Olivier for a film version of the play, with which to boost the morale of the English citizenry. It appeared in 1944, dedicated to “the Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to recapture.” The movie was a commercial and artistic success, winning Olivier an honorary Academy Award “for his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.”

Given the tensions of those times, it’s no surprise that the war as depicted in Olivier’s Henry V is picturesque and fairly bloodless. Almost 50 years later, in 1989, Kenneth Branagh was gutsy enough to film the play once again. His version (which like Olivier’s features the cream of the British acting community) is powerful and realistic, containing battlefield scenes that strongly convey the horrors of war.

I bring all this up because two films that take us back more than 75 years to another English war are in the running for the 2018 Best Picture Oscar. I confess I haven’t seen Darkest Hour, which I understand is best served by Gary Oldman’s stirring portrayal of Winston Churchill, captured at a moment when he and his strong anti-Nazi views are finally coming to be adopted by Britain’s royals and its citizenry. I did, however, see Dunkirk, which has been called an impressionistic account of the massive British evacuation of a French beach in one of World War II’s most pivotal moments. Dunkirk is a labor of love for British director Christopher Nolan, who’s best known for such science fiction and fantasy fare as The Dark Knight and Interstellar. It’s clear he feels deeply about this moment in history, when thousands of small English seafaring vessels sailed across the English Channel to rescue English soldiers. The film cuts between a pilot in the sky, the crew of a fishing boat on the water, and a representative British “Tommy” trying to leave that corpse-strewn French beach. My problem: I could never figure out quite where I was and who was at the center of the action at any given moment. (At least in my American eyes, young English actors all seem to look pretty much the same.)

Nolan has been praised for making a strikingly different sort of war film. I certainly got a sense of the enormity of the whole undertaking. But having to continuously ask “Wait, what’s going on?” is not a helpful sort of history lesson.

"Brush Up Your Shakespeare" -- The Bard at the Movies

Tomorrow, April 23, will mark the 400^th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) who wrote -- or did not write, according to some curmudgeons -- the greatest plays in the English language. Shakespeare was clearly an efficient man: note his skill at re-purposing plot devices, many of them stolen from the writings of others. That’s why it makes a weird sort of sense that he was also apparently born on April 23. So the day is cause for a double celebration. But, no, I don’t plan to serve cake.

Shakespeare, of course, didn’t know from movies. But I suspect he would have enjoyed their ability to capture spectacle in a way that the stage of the Globe Theater could not. Some of the greatest movies made from his plays (and there have been many) have reveled in the visual possibilities of the medium. I’m thinking particularly of Laurence Olivier’s stirring production of Henry V, a tale of military heroism which raised the spirits of the British people in the dark days of World War II. (By contrast there was Kenneth Branagh’s equally impressive 1989 film adaptation of the same play, which saw war in a much darker light.)

I see before me not a dagger (English majors will note the Macbeth reference) but a fancy program booklet my mother bought for 25 cents when she attended a screening of MGM’s Romeo and Juliet on November 15, 1936. (She was nice enough to write the date on the cover.) Clearly, the film’s debut was a very big deal. It was, as the booklet makes quite clear, the first Romeo and Juliet ever to be put on film. The prestige production, directed by George Cukor and overseen by MGM’s Irving Thalberg, starred Leslie Howard along with Thalberg’s lovely wife, Norma Shearer, supported by such well-known thespians as John Barrymore (Mercutio), Edna May Oliver (Juliet’s Nurse), and Basil Rathbone (Tybalt). Andy Devine’s there too, in the comic role of the Nurse’s manservant. I first saw this Romeo and Juliet when I was college-age. What immediately struck me is how stiff and prim everyone is . . . and how mature. Leslie Howard, the ardent “young” Romeo, was 43 when the film came out. His Juliet was in her early 30s. It’s a good film, very well-spoken, but it certainly lacks the rough-and-tumble that mark more modern adaptations.

Fortunately, in 1968, along came a Romeo and Juliet for the Baby Boom generation, directed by Italy’s Franco Zeffirelli. His depiction of old Verona is a visual treat, and he had the good sense to cast actors who were age appropriate: his Romeo (Leonard Whiting) was 18 years old, and Juliet (Olivia Hussey) a mere 15. Those of us in the throes of our own youthful romances (myself included) never quite got over the beauty and the ardor we saw on screen in this film.

Almost twenty years later, in 1996, the irrepressible Baz Luhrman had his way with Shakespeare, producing and directing a Generation X Romeo and Juliet that kept the Bard’s language but featured guns, speeding cars, and two lovers embracing in a swimming pool. Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet featured a young and gorgeous Leonardo DiCaprio opposite the exquisite teen-aged Claire Danes. Personally, I loved the idea of seeing Shakespearean visuals updated for young hipsters while keeping the spirit of the work intact.

Then of course there is West Side Story (1961), which turns feuding families into rival street gangs whose hatred of one another stems from their ethnic differences. Whatever the era, Shakespeare seems to have something to say.