Ojai Festival Presents Its Midsummer Night’s Play With Puckish Good Humor

Fifteen years into its current incarnation, the Ojai Shakespeare Festival continues this month with its main event, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and two worthy ancillary shows.

“Midsummer” seems to live up to the festival’s labeling as “Shakespeare’s most popular comedy”: Though it’s the festival’s first production of the play since 1983, and the first at Libbey Bowl since September, 1992, it’s Ventura County’s second “Midsummer” of the year. (Santa Susana Repertory Company had a production at Cal Lutheran in late June.) And there has been a production or two somewhere in the county pretty much every year by the Conejo Players, Plaza Players and sundry others. In fact, another show at Cal Lutheran this year, “The Rude Mechanicals,” was based on “Midsummer.”

While its selection may not show much imagination, and three hours plus is too darned long for a frothy confection, director Paul Backer has added some interesting touches to the classic tale of romantic mix-ups resulting from mischief between spirits and humans. He makes Oberon, Titania, Puck and their retinue of fairies pre-Christian wood sprites rather than the Victorian version often portrayed (Ashley Roecca, as fairy king Oberon, seems costumed as some sort of South Pacific royalty, and whoever costumed Samantha Free as Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, seems to have looked to TV’s Xena for inspiration.)

Backer has given many of the other characters a distinctly modern touch. One could easily imagine initially regal Hermia (Lorraine MacDonald) and feisty Helena (Keely Quinn, especially fun) duking it out in the mall, for instance. And as Quince--leader of the play-within-a-play’s theatrical troupe--Chris Palmquist camps it up like Paul Benedict directing “King Lear” in “The Goodbye Girl.”

James Leslie and Ryan Lee strongly portray rivals Demetrius and Lysander, and Michael Cornaccia takes the part of ham actor Nick Bottom and runs with it with as much enthusiasm as Bottom himself might have. As in virtually every production of “Midsummer,” the scenes featuring Quince, Bottom and the “rude mechanicals”--the bumbling traveling community theater group--incite the play’s strongest laughter.

The set, designed by Jenny K. Snider and Mia Torres, is a wonder, combining Athenian courtyard and deep forest on one stage. And the production crew worked marvels Saturday night, despite the fact that a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of equipment had been stolen the night before.

(If anybody you know has suddenly come into possession of several Motorola headsets or an antique sword, give the Shakespeare Festival a call.)

Preceding the play on Saturday and Sunday afternoons is “No Holds Bard,” a revue of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, with songs by the resident Madrigali Renaissance Voices (formerly the Measure for Measure Minstrels). The scenes are brief, rowdy and comic; most of the players also appear in “Midsummer”--notable, for instance, are Bruce as the hapless Malvolio, reading a forged love note in “Twelfth Night,” and Ashley Roecca and Lorraine MacDonald in a cobbled-together sequence from “The Taming of the Shrew.” And the singing is, as expected, lovely.

On Thursday nights, the same players run through many of the same scenes (and many others) in a 90-minute production called “The Bawdy Bard,” in which the material is given much extra mugging and leering, and songs are added that probably weren’t in the sheet music perched proudly on your great-great-grandmother’s spinet. Bawdy, indeed, and lusty, it’s not recommended for children. A brief preview after Saturday’s “Midsummer” was quite entertaining. Both “The Bawdy Bard” and “No Holds Bard” were directed by Jaye Hersh, who sings in the ensemble.

BE THERE

The Ojai Shakespeare Festival continues through Aug. 17 at Libbey Bowl, Libbey Park, Ojai Avenue at Signal Street in Ojai.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is performed Friday through Sunday evenings at 7:30. Tickets are $12 general and $10 for seniors and students on Friday and Sunday nights; $15 general and $12 for seniors and students on Saturdays. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, with pre-show dinner available: $8 for tri-tip and $6 vegetarian, or patrons are invited to bring their own dinners for consumption before the show.

“No Holds Bard” can be seen at 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, and “The Bawdy Bard” plays Thursdays at 8 p.m. Tickets to both are $8, $7 for seniors and students. Children 12 and under are admitted free to all events. For reservations or further information, call 646-9455.