Director rewrites Shakespeare to reach wider audiences

Director and producer Michael Tasche has rewritten and shortened William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a musical to make the play easier for modern audiences to follow, BR reported. The production is being staged at the Komödie im Bayerischen Hof theatre in Munich.

Tasche said audiences can become exhausted by Shakespeare’s complex verse and outdated imagery. He said he wanted to prevent the popular comedy from being performed only for an intellectual theatre audience.

Shakespeare wrote the play in iambic pentameter. Earlier German translators, including August Wilhelm Schlegel, tried to preserve the original verse as closely as possible. Tasche said he kept Shakespeare’s images and comparisons but changed the language spoken by the fairies Puck, Oberon and Titania from iambic pentameter to a simpler alternating rhyme.

He described his version as a “totally crazy” musical focused on creating an entertaining evening that everyone can understand. The production also introduces a fictional electrician who searches for the fuse box and deals with burned-out power lines before becoming part of the plot.

Tasche said he removed some material and concentrated on the central story of two couples who are repeatedly enchanted during a dispute between Oberon and Titania and fall in love with the wrong people. He said the original play would last three and a half hours, but that the plot remained complete in his shortened version.

Composer Bastian Pusch contributed the songs. Some are designed for dancing, while others are softer and more conventional. The performances received warm applause, and the audience appeared to welcome the simplified Shakespeare.

The production’s performers differ in experience and ability, however. Not all of them consistently match the vocal demands, and some scenes resemble student theatre. The sound system also receives criticism.

Some theatregoers may have been hoping to hear the famous music Felix Mendelssohn composed for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including its wedding march. But that music is now around 200 years old and is regarded as classical and traditional rather than necessarily funny.