Arts & Entertainment
‘Midsummer’ magic
Cleverly staged production transports action to the 1940s
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
Through Dec. 30
Shakespeare Theatre Company
Sidney Harman Hall
610 F Street NW
$43-$105
202-547-1122
Christiana Clark as Helena and Amelia Pedlow as Hermia in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ (Photo by Scott Suchman; courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre Company)
Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” brings together fairies, high-born Athenians and a sextet of skilled workmen with theatrical aspirations to create an improbable but magical world where even the most extreme situations end happily. In a visually exciting and extremely fun production currently playing at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall, director Ethan McSweeny keeps the old material fresh.
McSweeny’s take is appropriately magic-filled and newly theatrical. He sets the story in the 1940s inside an empty theater where possibilities are boundless. After all, as the program points out, Shakespeare premiered this play on a bare stage. With two balconies, a couple chandeliers, fly ropes, trap doors, Lee Savage’s beautiful set — a once grand theater — is essentially a blank slate, allowing the action to move convincingly (with the help of Tyler Micoleau’s skilled lighting) from Athens to an enchanted forest.
Cast members are equally versatile. Tim Cambell and Sara Topham appealingly play the comely ruling couple Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, as well as Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the fairies. Adam Green splendidly transforms from Theseus’ oddly buttoned up assistant to literature’s mischief maker extraordinaire, Puck. Dressed in a corset and breeches, Green’s agile fairy nimbly traverses the set delighting in the mayhem he initiates without ever being too cutesy or grating. It’s a terrific performance.
“Dream” is a comic tale of young love, both requited and not. Hermia (Amelia Pedlow) cannot bear Demetrius (Chris Myers), the preppy boy her father insists she must marry. Instead she loves Lysander (Robert Beitzel), a folksy poet who is never without his acoustic guitar. Hermia’s best friend Helena (the excellent Christiana Clark), whose taste runs toward shopping and chocolates, loves Demetrius; but alas Demetrius loves Hermia. In order escape her father’s commands, Hermia and Lysander retreat to the woods.
Along the way, before all ends well, Hermia and Helena, clad only in their underthings, fall into a long, drawn out cat fight (staged wet and goopy by McSweeny). The boys (also stripped to their skivvies) get involved too. Puck watches from the sidelines perched in a theater balcony nibbling on popcorn. Invisible to the young lovers, he descends into the fray, cleverly egging on the battle. It’s a wonderfully well-rehearsed scene that comes off without a hitch.
“Dream’s” amusing subplot focuses on the rude mechanicals, a group of workers including a tinker and a tailor who are keen to perform a work of their own making (Shakespeare’s enduring slapstick-filled skit within the play) for the Duke and Queen. Led by Ted van Griethuysen as Peter Quince, the group of avid amateur thespians includes Robin Starveling (Christopher Bloch), Tom Snout (a dour Herschel Sparber), the slowwitted Snug (Robert Dorfman) and the wonderful David Graham Jones as Francis Flute who plays the mechanical’s enthusiastic ingénue. The group’s most eager member, Nick Bottom, is hilariously played by Bruce Dow as a total drama queen, more than ready for his close up.
McSweeney’s imagery is unforgettable: The show strikingly opens with the Duke (covered in medals) and his first lady (looking more than a little Evita-ish with a chic hat and carefully arranged fur piece), addressing their drab public from the palace balcony. There is the moving tableau featuring an ardent Titania and her disinterested paramour Bottom (who has been magically made into an ass) being pulled across stage by a team of young fairies as they lie in the gutted piano that serves as their bed. Then at the play’s close, there’s Puck making his apologies to the audience lit by the glow of a lone ghost light.
Jennifer Moeller provides a collection of impeccably realized costumes from the 1940s suits and gowns worn by the Athenians to Oberon and Titania’s romantic frayed remnants of court finery. And the fairies’ costumes: vintage foundation garments topped with odds and ends culled from an abandoned backstage.
With its classic storyline, inventive staging and delightful cast that handles the language and comedy more than ably, Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” makes perfect holiday fare both for Bard aficionados and the uninitiated alike.
The 2026 Capital Pride Parade was held in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 20.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key and Landon Shackelford)
Theater
‘Feeling Afraid’ explores life of a neurotic stand-up comic
Navigating sex, work, and possibly love in London
‘Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen’
Through July 12
Studio Theatre
1501 14th St., N.W.
$55-$102
Studiotheatre.org
Wordily yet rightly titled, solo show “Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen” dives deeply into the world of a neurotic stand-up comic as he navigates sex, work, and possibly love in London.
Busy arranging hookups and dates on “The App,” the 36-year-old gay funnyman juggles a full dance card; still he’s never been in a romantic relationship. While he’s willing to give love a shot, he’s not pressed about it. As he says, he harbors no fear of dying alone.
Currently making its American premiere at Studio Theatre, this darkly humorous Edinburgh Fringe import features terrific out English actor Steven Webb as The Comedian who’s about to explore what it means to spend all his time with one man.
At Studio’s intimate Mead Theatre, Kat Heath’s minimal set says standard comedy club (fluorescent tube lighting, the mic with a long cord, a single stool backed by a rose-colored curtain), but gay playwright Marcelo Dos Santos has conjured something much more than a live comedy set.
Yes, The Comedian bounces onstage in his red Converse high tops, jeans, and pink shirt with a huge mouth emblazoned on the back, but he delivers more than jokes. At times hilariously self-deprecating, then dark, and occasionally a lesson on what makes standup work, this is a layered, well-acted piece.
With Webb (a keen caricaturist of types and voices) playing all the parts while conducting The Comedian’s hilariously frenetic interior monologue, “Feeling Afraid” takes us through a summer of love. It seems after six chaste dates with The American, our nervous hero has found Mr. Right. The American is earnest, smart, hesitant to initiate sex. He’s also well built with a beautiful smile. And strangely, he’s been medically advised not to laugh aloud.
The Comedian delights in the joys of new love: dates, first kisses, sex, and then suddenly spending all of his time with the adored. Visits to art galleries become fun. Eating home cooked meals followed by grim documentaries is a thing. The Comedian is beguiled as his own boyish figure fills out, but something isn’t right. He can’t entirely relax.
Along the way we meet the Aussie doctor, our protagonist’s longtime hookup; a young runner with some exceptional body parts; the random third in a failed threesome; grumpy working comics, male and female; and an ineffectual counselor.
Webb gives a lightning-fast performance that boggles the mind (in terms velocity and virtuosity). He can be impish, very impish. He’s nervous energy incarnate, flashing jazz hands, grimacing but handsome when still. He’s likeable, a necessity when delivering a hilariously rude joke just feet away from two stone-faced audience members. (Perhaps they were laughing on the inside? At any rate, they stayed through the end the show.)
Produced by the team behind Fringe hits “Fleabag” and “Baby Reindeer,” small stage works that were developed into major TV screen successes, “Feeling Afraid” is funny for sure, and it’s also highly confessional, sexually explicit, and raw.
Written by Dos Santos during COVID lockdown, the piece was a smash hit in the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe before finding further success in London. Its depiction of a youngish queer guy navigating the big city rings entirely true. Like so much Fringe stuff, the one-man show is delightfully lewd and standup inspired.
One little moan: the show closes cleverly but too abruptly with its star dashing offstage without sufficiently basking in the admiration and applause of his thoroughly chuffed audience.
They say third time’s a charm, and regarding “Feeling Afraid,” I’d agree. After two performance cancellations (first for laryngitis and the second involving faulty air conditioning on an especially muggy June evening), I made my third trek to Studio where I found both the actor and AC in very fine fettle. And truly, Webb’s work was more than worth the wait.
The 2026 Baltimore Pride Festival, “Pride in the Park,” was held at Druid Hill Park on Sunday, June 14.
(Washington Blade photos by Linus Berggren)
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