m Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet"? Given the less-than-likely prospect of anyone supposing that "Dracula," "Anna Karenina," and "Romeo and Juliet" might be written by anyone but their respective illustrious authors, the tacking on of their names seems a blatant and desperate attempt to borrow respectability for, aesthetically speaking, a lost cause. So it is with the new "William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream."It isn't a total disaster, and it gives Shakespeare slightly better billing than the famous Max Reinhardt version of 1935 with Olivia de Havilland, Jimmy Cagney, and Mickey Rooney, with its listing of two screenwriters, then, in smaller type, Shakespeare. You can tell who didn't have an agent on the scene to protect him. In this new version, the actors need more protection than they get in Michael Hoffman's sometimes pretty but decidedly pedestrian production that goes the leafy bower route, but misses entirely the moonlit lyricism and poetry. It thus misses the play's subtext and dualities of the regulated rational world of the dukedom played against the gossamer strands of id bubbling up from underneath the sleeping superegos in the nocturnally liberated natural world of the forest.You know there's a gaping lack in any "Midsummer Night's Dream" production that peaks with the Pyramus and Thisbe travesty. Here it's the best element by far, not only because Kevin Kline is one of the few actors whose recitation of the lines isn't an embarrassment, but because he's got the training and finesse to project the wistful dreamer as well as the overweening ass in Bottom the Weaver. Part of the fun in "Shakespeare in Love" was its way of convincing us Shakespeare knew how insecure actors behave. Here's the play that confirms it. Kline's performance not only is deliciously funny, but is touched with a nobility that eludes almost all the nominal nobles. It's buttressed by Bill Irwin, Max Wright, and even, for a rarity, the piping Th...
