THEATER REVIEWS : An Enchanting ‘Midsummer’ Night’s Dream’ at Globe Playhouse

The Globe Playhouse, which staged the whole Shakespeare canon in its heyday, has returned to the Bard with one of its strongest productions ever in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Director Alex Daniels, with a zest that’s infectious, has rapturously commingled the three realms of courtly aristocracy, fairy folklore and rude mechanicals. The result is a vivid, lyrical, dreamy show so enchanting that you feel, like the players in it, that you might have dreamt the whole thing.

The robust cast is led by Patric Zimmerman’s buffoon Bottom (cloaked in a darkly frightening ass’s head), Gary Morgan’s tumbling goblin Puck and a physically spectacular Oberon and Titania (Eric Briant Wells and Sarah MacDonnell). The latter turn the king and queen of the fairies into towering, elemental forces that create a magic forest full of the beauty of the night--all the better for a play that takes place largely under moonlight.

Daniels has draped the Globe’s half-scale replica of the original Globe in blankets of flowers and botanical imagery, and he has directed his fairies (led by the exotic Lena Banks) to chirp and prance with vaguely mechanical gestures to underscore their gnome-like nature. These are real fairies, though, more like monkeys than creatures in a child’s ballet.

Daniels and his producer, Michael Blackburn, cling to a traditional interpretation, most visibly in A. Jeffrey Schoenberg’s rich 16th-Century costumes, but the experience is anything but fusty.

In fact, the look of the production suggests the gossamer world of Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film adaptation. Tony Potter’s lighting design plunges you into a forest of dark blues and greens, and the Athenian royalty (notably Katie Leede’s Hippolyta and Paul St. Peter’s Egeus capture the requisite aloofness.

What’s important to remember is that none of these characters is realistic. There’s an airiness and distance about all of them (with the slight exception of the working-class clowns) that throw into relief a play that celebrates married love. Even the formal young lovers Hermia and Lysander (Janine Venable and Ralph Purdum) and their counterparts Helena and Demetrius (Dana Williams and Nicholas Rempel) achieve that romantic separateness with a stylized playing. And it is here that director Daniels most shows his keen appreciation of Shakespeare.

* “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Globe Playhouse, 1107 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood . Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends March 28. $10-$20. (213) 654-5623. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.