A visually attractive film, but overall reminiscent of "Finian's Rainbow" without the advantage of interesting music. The Ridiculous Theatrical companys version of A Midsummer Nights Dream is the magical story of star crossed lovers, overly ambitious homespun clowns and. The pace remains suitably frantic until the last fifteen minutes, which appear to be an attempt at sentiment but fall flat. A Midsummer-nights dream / by William Shakespeare translated, with an introduction and notes, by Ephraim Broido. Finally, the filming takes a story originally set in ancient Greece, with a small cadre of 17th-century English clowns, and transposes it to turn-of-the century Italy - without any effort to reconcile the resulting inconsistencies. Kevin Kline oscillates from hambone to buffoon to romantic dreamer - all of which he does well, but they don't add up to a single coherent character.
Calista Flockhart manages to make her character highly appealing despite the high tragedy that pervades her every word, while romantic male leads Christian Bale and Dominic West remain thoroughly unlikeable throughout. Only Puck - naturally the sprightliest and most off-beat character - is pleasantly mild. Almost every spoken line is an exercise in melodrama.
As a result, many significant elements of the resulting story are done in pantomime - since they were never in the original script (sort of an inversion of the "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" experiment). The director apparently decided to challenge himself - but not the audience - by using Shakespeare's words, extracting every possible innuendo and making each one graphic no subtlety is permitted. An exaggerated, soap-opera-like version of Shakespeare.
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