A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a surefire box office winner. It’s long been considered one of Shakespeare’s most approachable plays, due to its appealing characters, humorous plot complications, and language that rings the changes from rustic simplicity through witty aristocratic banter to lyrical flights of supernatural fancy. As such, it’s typically considered actor-proof; say your lines, hit your marks and you’ve done your job.

Director-proof, however, can be another story; from Max Reinhardt’s 1930s outdoor spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl through Peter Hall’s 1960s “white box” chamber version with the Royal Shakespeare Company, to recent decades’ fad for gender-bending within the core romances, Shakespeare is frequently swallowed up in directors’ need to Get Our Attention And Make A Statement. The first time my wife and I saw the play at Stratford in 2004, Leon Rubin’s production conceits (“The enchanted wood’s like a — a rain forest! So we’ll set the whole thing in South America! Oh, and the fairies are acrobats too!”) proved an active turn-off; the characters and humor were all but smothered by the bells and whistles of distracting costumes, scenery and spectacle.

In his program note, director Graham Abbey threatens full-on Regietheater, making opaque noises about reveling in disorder and the necessity of rebellion. But fortunately, Abbey’s basic trust in Shakespeare. along with his solid dramatic instincts, carry the day. This is by and large A Midsummer Night’s Dream as veteran admirers know it and those encountering it for the first time should.

Abbey’s biggest tweak is setting the action in late Victorian England, and that works – because arguably, Shakespeare’s original human characters are pretty doggone universal across cultures, no matter their Athenian names. So Evan Buliung’s Theseus is appropriately pompous yet engaging, whether wooing Ijeoma Emesowum’s reluctant but not adamant Hippolyta or throwing up his hands at the young lovers’ relationship hassles. Vivien Endicott-Douglas is a wonderfully straight-up Hermia, gushingly in love; Jessica B. Hill grabs the majority of the laughs as a dryly funny yet vulnerable Helena; Jordin Hall and Thomas Duplessie start out bland and interchangeable as Lysander and Demetrius, but put clever props (a ukelele and a deerstalker hat, respectively) to good use opening up their characters. The rustic mechanicals – morphed to traveling circus players in this version – are, as usual, winningly earnest and hopelessly out of their depth from top (Sarah Dodd’s flustered dramaturge Rita Quince) to Bottom (Nick Spencer-Davis in an appropriately bravura comic turn).

And of course, when all and sundry wander into the enchanted wood of Shakespeare’s fairies Oberon (Andre Sills, seasoning his usual power and magnetism with sly humor), Titania (a spellbinding Sara Topham, whose every line and gesture compel attention) and Puck (Mike Nadajewski, energetically committed to maximum disruption) — mayhem breaks loose, with the audience quite literally in the midst of it. As fairies troop down the theatre aisles to the thrust stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre (pulsating with subtly immersive digital projections and surround-sound effects) and Nadajewski persistently breaks the fourth wall, playing to the crowd with sneaky pranks and Phil Collins-style party tricks, we wind up every bit as loopy as the lovers, as bemused as Bottom and company. And Abbey’s second-biggest tweak – unwinding Oberon’s curse on Titania through mutual forgiveness instead of further deception – puts us in the same boat as everyone else exiting the wood; not quite certain of our footing, but ready for a breather via The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe (enacted by the mechanicals with eager flair, organic pratfalls and a hilarious pastiche soundtrack of classical/Romantic chestnuts, courtesy of pianist Michael Man’s Robin Starveling).

To sum up: most (though not all) directors’ theater versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream stutter and stumble trying to make their point. Though Abbey’s take on the play is portentous on the surface, the loose, fantastical staging and slapstick comedy of this production issue directly from Shakespeare’s characters and situations, given fire and vibrancy by a first-rate cast where the young players step up to the level of their veteran Festival colleagues. The few tiny hiccups here are vastly outweighed by a real devotion to the absurdity and the grace baked in by the poet himself. From Row G of the theatre, this was an utterly enjoyable vision of the Dream, one that brings to life Theseus’ Act 5 summation of the night:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to
heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

— Rick Krueger

A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre through September 26th. For information, schedule and ticket sales click here.

[For maximum effect, read the next paragraph aloud with a New York accent:]

So this gentleman Damon Runyon, a progeny of Kansas grown to manhood in Colorado, comes to the big city of Manhattan to pursue his vocation as a journalist in the early 1900s. His greatest success, though, turns out to be his fictional “fables of Broadway”, where a motley cast of “guys” pursue their vocations: penny ante gambling; recounting their tall tales in verbose orotund sentences couched in the historical present and spiced with a smattering of Yiddish; staying one step ahead of the law, the “big boys” of their chosen profession, and the “dolls” that seem to lurk around every corner to knock them off their desired courses. These fables prove to be so popular that, in 1950, they become a Broadway musical . . .

And what a musical it is! Though Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma pioneered the full integration of tunes with story on Broadway, Guys and Dolls elevated the genre to the sparkling heights of Strauss’ Die Fledermaus or Mozart’s The Magic Flute, while hitting the bullseye of pop culture at the Great American Songbook’s height. Production roadblocks meant that Frank Loesser’s jazzy songs came first, laying out the characters and plot twists of Runyon’s “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” all by themselves; his lyrics teem with wit and warmth, his music stuffs soaring melodic earworms into compellingly clever forms. All book writer Abe Burrows had to do was sharpen the setting and exposition (and set up as many opportunities for ensemble dance numbers as possible) and voila! – an affectionate, rough-edged romp that sets petty crooks, burlesque dancers and revivalist missionaries at odds, then lets romance complicate the whole meshuggah situation.

Over the decades, this kind of big musical has become catnip for the Stratford Festival, sitting comfortably alongside Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Beckett, Arthur Miller and world premieres in the current season’s repertory. And mounted on the Festival Theatre’s unique thrust stage for the fourth time, Guys and Dolls plays every bit as spectacularly as when my wife and I saw it on our first trip here back in 2004. Veteran Donna Feore’s direction is ceaselessly vivid and lively, flowing into organic, breathtaking choreography from the “Runyonland” overture and the opening vocal canon “Fugue for Tinhorns” onward, backed by a live 20-piece orchestra. Onstage Manhattan street life feels as bustling and busy as when you’re there in person; the characters populating Nathan Detroit’s “oldest established floating crap game in New York”, Sister Sarah Brown’s Save-A-Soul Mission and Miss Adelaide’s Hot Box all bubble over with anticipation and zest for whatever may come their way. Even wandering roustabout Sky Masterson brings his own atmosphere with him: smitten by Sarah, crashing her mission and (based on a bet with Nathan) sweeping her away to Havana, where neither can find the words to express their feelings without breaking into song . . .

Whatever the overall impression, it’s the principal actors who make or break a show like this, and every one of them delivers here. Best known for screwball comedy, Dan Chameroy delivers a bluff, charismatic male lead in Sky, whether letting down his guard on “My Time of Day” or stepping up for the gamble of his life on “Luck Be A Lady”. Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane proves a top-notch ingenue, a bit strident in her high vocal range, but wonderfully steely on “I’ll Know” and comedically tipsy on “If I Were A Bell” (one of Miles Davis’ standby tunes). When sparks fly between the two on “I’ve Never Been in Love Before”, the effect is genuine and magical. Then there’s Mark Uhre’s Nathan and Jessica Rider Shaw’s Adelaide as a delightfully neurotic second couple, longtime lovers each afraid in their own way of commitment (“Adelaide’s Lament” and the duet “Sue Me” are both smartly, squirmingly hilarious). Meanwhile, sideline observers like Steve Patterson as mission colleague Arvide Abernathy (who nails the fatherly “More I Cannot Wish You”) and Steve Ross as Nathan’s comic colleague Nicely-Nicely Johnson (who steals the show on the title song and the uproarious “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat”) look on in bemusement, knowing from experience how these crazy kids’ tangles will work themselves out.

It’s a tribute to this cast’s talent and commitment that most of them – including Uhre, Chameroy and Sinclair-Brisbane in principal roles – are also in Feore’s remount of the nutty Shakespeare send-up Something Rotten (sometimes playing both productions on the same day). But the Stratford Festival is consistently good at theatrical miracles like this. And in its warmly humanist view of life out of the mainstream, Guys and Dolls itself is kind of miraculous: underneath its postwar, American-as-apple- pie optimism, this is a schmaltzy, mischievously naughty yet emotionally true take on how the love of your life can ambush you on any corner as you wait for something to happen – whether you’re singing your song, dancing your dance, pounding your big bass drum or just hanging out.

Guys and Dolls plays at the Stratford Festival Theatre until November 1st. For information, more sneak previews, schedules and ticket sales, click here.

— Rick Krueger