By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Hanging with Shakespeare at the Citadel….
To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.
Time flies when you’re having fun. It’s lunchtime. And director Daryl Cloran, along with Theseus, Hippolyta, a bunch of rustic artisans, and Titania, Oberon, Puck and that fairyland Midsummer Night’s Dream crowd, have been working on … a Supertramp song.
It’s one of 25 songs, hits from the ‘70s you’ll recognize in a flash, in a new musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy.
“I’ve been playing in this world of musicalizing Shakespeare for a while,” says Cloran, whose creative partner on this new project is Kayvon Khoshkam, artistic director of Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical, Cloran says, was inspired by the cross-country cross-border success of his 2018 musical adaptation of As You Like It that paired Will and the Beatles. Before that, in 2015 he’d done a jazz musical version of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan verse extravaganza Love’s Labour’s Lost, set in a Prohibition era speakeasy, at Bard on the Beach in Vancouver. And people loved it. During As You Like It “people would constantly say to me ‘what’s your next one going to be?’ With endless bad suggestions … like a Macbeth with all Meat Loaf songs.”
Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran
“I got excited about A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” says Cloran, a notable theatrical free-associator, “because it’s so full of magic and fantasy. And so much of 1970s music has that quality as well…. One of the first images I had was Puck (the fairy sprite) as a sort of David Bowie/ Ziggy Stardust character.”
That got him started. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, after all, a tangle of romantic miscues and entanglements, four plots in intersecting worlds. And the musical possibilities multiply accordingly. “The court. The lovers. The fairies: Oberon (the fairy king) as a Led Zeppelin-esque rocker. Titania (the fairy queen) as r&b, or maybe disco.… And all accompanied by ‘the mechanicals’ (the stage-struck artisans led by Bottom the weaver) as a garage band.”
So the new musical gets a house band “to support the singers all the way through.” And then, in the play’s most perennially hilarious scene, the play-within-a-play the rustics perform for the court, these showbiz hopefuls can do the grand finale “as a big concert musical!”
“With As You Like It, it was all about ‘how do you use all the Beatles songs?’” says Cloran. “Here, it was an opportunity to play with many different genres of music, and how they come up against each other…. It was ‘OK, I see how this genre of music could support this world, and tell the story we need it to tell’.”
He and Khoshkam, a very funny Touchstone in Cloran’s As You Like It, set about doing their own Shakespearean research. Cloran laughs. “It became about listening to hundreds of songs (and choosing)…. What’s the best fit? What can we get the rights for?”
Luc Tellier plays Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the ’70s musical at the Citadel. Photo supplied
Luc Tellier, who plays the fairy sprite go-fer and agitator Puck, his dream role in Dream, laughs that “the thing I always appreciate being in on a new Daryl experience is that we do not do anything by half-measures at the Citadel!” The show, he says, “is packed to the gills with amazing songs…. It’s like a ‘70s Rock of Ages. But with a donkey and fairies, and a beautiful text we get to roll around in.”
“I actually love jukebox musicals,” says actor/director Tellier, who’s into his fourth season as the Citadel’s director of outreach and education. “The songs usually have some kind of cultural significance, so there’s an immediate response from the audience. Which is part of the fun.”
“Where jukebox musicals fall flat, for me, is in the text,” he says of the mighty labour of getting an audience to connect to a book that doesn’t quite fit the music. No problem here, Tellier jokes. “Daryl hired William Shakespeare to write this book!”
“Amazing rhythms and rhymes and funny characters…. Tell you what, the man’s great! He’s written us a really wonderful play. And I think he should keep at it! He’s got a future in the biz.”
Cloran, who went to high school in the ‘90s, says “most of my music then was alternative. But I do have a love of and connection to the music of the ‘70s. Everyone does! When you start down that rabbit hole, there are so many great songs everyone knows. And these are top hits,” he says. Stayin’ Alive, I Will Survive, Dream Weaver … “you want the joy of that audience recognition.”
For Tellier, the ‘70s are even farther into the past. “I’m doing a period piece,” he says. “I’m not a ‘70s kid, But all these tunes still resonate with me; they’re still recognizable and fun…. This is very very accessible Shakespeare.”
With a song list as fulsome as A Midsummer NIght’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical, Cloran and Khoshkam took scissors to the play. “And we cut a lot!” says Cloran, “close to a third if not half of the text. You don’t want to double, to have a monologue and then a song about the exact same thing.” Says Tellier, “we had to cull the passages that wander a bit…. The ‘operatic moments’ in the play we do with a rock band and hits by Supertramp.”
Puck, “the merry wanderer of the night,” is Tellier’s dream role in Dream. “Let me be Puck! Let me be the fairy sprite! I have loved Puck from the moment I first met him.” Which was a Fringe version he saw at age 10, and got enchanted by the fairy world conjured by Shakespeare.
Tellier has been in the play before, a 2013 Freewill Shakespeare Festival production in which he played Flute the bellows-mender (and Thisbe in the play-within-a-play) opposite John Ullyatt as Bottom the bossy weaver who takes charge of rustics’ rehearsals. Ullyatt returns to that juicy role in the new Citadel production.
For Tellier, last onstage at the Citadel in Almost A Full Moon in 2022, the attractions of Puck include the way he speaks to the audience (“a fun ambiguity with the fourth wall”). “I get to have fun with the audience as they come into the space, and welcome them into the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I sort of ride the wave with the audience a bit, and see it through their eyes.
And I also get to mess about with the lovers, and turn an actor into a donkey, and cast some spells, and belt some tunes. I’m singing and dancing my little fairy butt off…. I’m in heaven.”
“And I am rocking a Ziggy Stardust-inspired sparkly bodysuit, tailor-made by the amazing team at the Citadel. So empowering to wear! Along with the ginger mullet I get to sport.”
Fun is a word that touches down lightly, and often, in conversation with Tellier. “I love the fairy sprite, and it’s been fun to explore a beautiful queerness that works in this show,” he says of a production that includes some gender-swapping in the lovers plot lines. “This gender-less but sexual queer sprite is a pleasure-seeker, a party planner…. Puck is always looking for ‘how can we make this more fun? What can I do to help make this party better?”
And speaking of parties, Cloran points to the visuals. Deanna Finnman’s ‘70s costumes, “have Titania and her fairies looking like Solid Gold dancers from the TV show.” And Hanne Loosen’s design “kinda looks like a disco ball exploded.”
With his new show, “the focus is on music, and on love stories: love in its many forms and music as the language to do it.” Says Cloran, “my interest is how to use the stories and characters in Shakespeare to connect to contemporary audiences.”
“There’s great room for theatrical interpretation and innovation with Shakespeare’s work,” he thinks. “The bones of a great story are always there.”
PREVIEW
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical
Theatre: Citadel Theatre
Adapted by: Daryl Cloran and Kayvon Khoshkam
Directed by: Daryl Cloran
Starring: Ruth Alexander, Billy Brown, Alexandra Dawkins, Oscar Derkx, Taylor Fawcett, Charlie Gallant, Kristel Harder, Rochelle Laplante, Jameela McNeil, Chirag Naik, Christina Nguyen, Biboye Onanuga, Bernardo Pacheko, Dean Stockdale, Luc Tellier, John Ullyatt
Running: Feb 22 to March 23
Tickets: citadeltheatre.com. 780 425-1820
