That guffawing you hear emanating from the downtown Minneapolis riverfront is because of a grotesque love scene onstage at the Guthrie Theater. There, Stephen Pelinski's Bottom, a yokel who has been transformed into a slack-jawed donkey, is happy to be in the company of fairy queen Titania (Emily Swallow). Because of a spell cast on her by fairy king Oberon (Nic Few), Titania falls in love with the first creature she sees. She sees an ass.
Whimsical transformation and unbridled libido are the fuel that powers Joe Dowling's funny, over-the-top revival of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The director has pulled out all the stops for his tee-heeing production, which opened last Friday. And it is very amusing, even if its spare-nothing richness can be likened to having seven courses of dessert.
This "Midsummer" is loaded with cultural references -- to Elvis, disco, doo-wop, Irish step dancing, Britney Spears and hip-hop. There is a touch of Cirque du Soleil in the flying fairies with hairdos that look like cotton candy passed through a wind tunnel.
Dowling's "Midsummer" also refers to contemporary politics. When Duke Theseus (also played by handsome Few) first enters at the top of scenic designer Frank Hallinan Flood's scaly green staircase, he looks like Barack Obama. And Hippolyta (the striking Swallow), the Amazon queen who resists his charms, is so Hillary Clinton. This nod to the current political season is helped along by Secret Service types with sunglasses and earpieces.
But Shakespeare's comedy is not buried under all this contemporary freight and froufrou. To the contrary, Dowling oversees a respect for the Bard's language. Occasionally, the elevated diction (exemplified by Few's reverential line readings) does seem at odds with the earthy gestures and movement vocabulary. And one cultural reference, Bottom's miming of a Rambo machine-gun moment, is discordant.
The dramaturgical question that usually attends productions of "Midsummer" is which of its three narratives will prove most engaging. In Dowling's staging, the lovers who are bewitched by chief mischief-maker Puck (Namir Smallwood as a mutant on toothpick legs) are beautiful and fetching. Even stripped down to generic undergarments, Valeri Mudek's Helena, Kathryn Lawrey's Hermia, William Sturdivant's Lysander and Jonas Goslow's Demetrius are still sexy.
The fairies, subconscious thoughts made flesh, are also notable, especially wiggly singer Erin Cherry as First Fairy. These beings, striped in primary colors and swinging on cables from the fly space, suggest not only the circus, but also carnival.
But it is the Rude Mechanicals played by Guthrie veterans -- including Pelinski's Bottom, Jim Lichtscheidl's Peter Quince, Stephen Yoakam's Snug, Sally Wingert's Robin Starveling and Randy Reyes' cross-dressing Francis Flute -- who take the cake. Partly because they have to ham it up so in their play-within-a-play, they threaten to blow the roof off the Guthrie. And that would create another sound altogether coming from the Minneapolis riverfront.
