A Little Midsummer Night’s Interpretive Dance

brendan — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:22:31 +0000

Back in 2006, when we spent the better part of six months working on writing and then rehearsing and then performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream with director Tina Landau, we made some lasting friendships with some of the actors. Notably, we had to collaborate closely with Jesse Nager (who sang so gloriously on our recording of “All Shall Be Well”) and Guy Adkins, who played Puck.

They’re both terrific guys, and both have a pretty wicked sense of humor, and one of the interesting aspects of doing the same show over and over again, 75 times, is that you start to imagine perverse interpretations of certain pieces of text or song.

The song “When I Dream” started off Act 2 – it was our comment on the fluid nature of the play and our invocation of a dreamworld. We like the song, but I have to admit that we tried to take the subject matter seriously–and one of the things about the video below is that Jesse and Guy act *completely serious* as they completely disembowel our song, and man, is it funny. (Note: some of the, well, gestures may be NSFW. Be forewarned.)

Also: note: this was off-stage. These people were doing this stuff backstage, in the dark, or in this stairwell you see below, and we didn’t get to actually see any of this until Adam Lobato, acrobatic fairy extraordinaire, filmed it for us with Val’s little camera. (I’m so glad he did.)

GrooveLily » Jesse Nager

A Little Midsummer Night’s Interpretive Dance