A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1982: Joseph Papp, Emile Ardolino
No longer available commercially on videotape or DVD, this can still be found occasionally in libraries in its VHS form. The film is based on a performance in the park, combining naturalistic outdoor settings with bizarrely mannered delivery, very peculiar costumes, and uneven acting. Joseph Papp was the director of at least one of the BBC Shakespeare plays; the adaptation for the stage is by James LePine, whose long theatrical career includes “Into the Woods”, on which he collaborated with Stephen Sondheim.
The lead roles go to some good actors, but the decisions behind the performance produce something that may have played better as live theater than on film. William Hurt as Oberon delivers his lines as if he were acting in a kabuki play, with exaggerated rising and falling pitches, that give an overall impression of a drug-induced stupefaction and leaves Shakespeare’s verse in complete disarray. Michele Shay’s Titania, on the other hand, roars many of her lines, with the result that the end product lacks any gradation of intensity. The whole is punctuated with peculiar and frankly tedious music alternating with stage effects that don’t work on film, and perhaps didn’t even quite work in live performance; in transferring the whole to film, finally, the production values are minimal at best.
Bottom: Jeffrey DeMunn
Demetrius: Rick Lieberman
Flute: Paul Bates
Helena: Christine Baranski
Hermia: Deborah Rush
Hippolyta: Diane Venora
Human child: Emmanuel Lewis
Lysander: Kevin Conroy
Oberon: William Hurt
Philostrate: Ricky Jay
Puck: Marcell Rosenblatt
Quince: Steve Vinovich
Snout: Andreas Katsulas
Snug: Peter Crook
Starveling: J. Patrick O’Brien
Theseus: James Hurdle
Titania: Michele Shay