Poor Richard's "Midsummer Night's Dream'

According to its mission statement, Poor Richard's Opera is "dedicated to giving young opera singers a chance to perform old works, new works and everything in between." For three seasons the company's guiding lights— producers Sydney Kagan and Katy Gentry Hutchings— have pursued this noble objective by presenting stripped-down productions, "usually performing in intimate spaces with piano accompaniment."

Their staging of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream offered minimal costuming sans settings, but they didn't economize on performers. Many theater companies save money by casting performers in multiple roles, but Poor Richard's impresarios stuck to their principles by providing employment for 19 singers, one for every role in Britten's opera.

The Poor Richard folks played some funny and inventive tricks with surtitles when they presented Verdi's Falstaff last September, and I had hoped they might do something similar with Shakespeare's text for A Midsummer Night's Dream. But this time they chose to forego the surtitles and instead advised the audience to follow the text by listening hard. As usual, this advice didn't work very well.

With some English-language operas, that would have been a fatal defect; with A Midsummer Night's Dream, linguistic incomprehensibility is a tolerable annoyance. The play is so familiar that I could infer most of Shakespeare's dialogue, even if I couldn't follow it word for word. I never felt I was watching a stage full of incomprehensible people doing incomprehensible things.

Low comedy

Part of the explanation is that Britten's music substitutes for Shakespeare's poetry, communicating the emotions that Shakespeare expressed with words. You didn't have to understand every word to feel the agitation of the Act II quarrel among the four lovers bedeviled by Puck's mischief. Britten's all-female fairy quartet that lulls the lovers to sleep is just as lovely as Shakespeare's poetry.

Poor Richard even overcame the challenges of Shakespeare's low comedy. The antics of country bumpkins trying to produce a play can seem tedious to a modern sensibility, but in this production, the bumpkins' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe in the last act provoked a stream of genuine laughter, even though it must be the most familiar comic act in English theater.

The performers maintained the uniform high standard that an ensemble production requires. Countertenor Mike Dorsey deserves some special mention for his Oberon. Robert Davidson played Duke Theseus— a minor third-act part, but one that sets the tone for the entire last third of the opera— with believable presence.

Finding a niche

Before the Internet age, artists could concentrate on their craft and sell their work in reasonably well-organized marketplaces. Writers could sell their words to established print markets. Musicians and actors could audition for established producers and performance companies.

Today, in every field, artists must become promoters and entrepreneurs. Old markets are crumbling and new types of opportunities are opening up. Writers are discovering that self-publishing can produce results. Visual artists peddle their wares over the Internet instead of relying on galleries. Musicians experiment with new types of organizations, not to mention utilizing enlivening e-mail to promote new chamber ensembles.

This is the third year Poor Richard's Opera has brightened the off-season lull with its inventive attempts to fill an attractive low-budget niche. Founders Kagan and Hutchings are still developing their artistic approach, but their creation is a promising response to the challenges of our turbulent new era.♦


To read a response, click here.