STAGE REVIEWS : A Dark Vision of Shakespeare’s Dreamy Comedy

As he showed with his musical-in-black-leather version of “ ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” director Robert A. Prior likes to turn the classics into dark, synthesizer-tinged rituals. But “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”? Will Roberson’s current Shakespeare Festival/L.A. version is set in mean city streets, but it never drifts away from the comedy’s innate sunniness. Prior’s, though, is unaccountably dark and murky and quasi-sinister, as if Macbeth’s witches had taken over the Arroyo Outback Theatre.

The darkness doesn’t hold, because everything in this Athenian wood has the overlay of tackiness--in the arch performances, Prior’s costumes, Curt Maranto’s sets and (yes, fluorescent) lights and Andrew Yeater’s never-ending music. Even a natural comic like Steve Ruggles (as Bottom) visibly peters out. Double, double, toil and trouble.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Arroyo Outback Theatre, 125 S. Ave. 57, Highland Park. Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 22. $11; (213) 259-2423. Running time: 3 hours, 10 minutes.