Moon Madness

Babes in the Wood uses A Midsummer Night's Dream as a getaway vehicle for a spoofy musical in which Composer-Librettist Rick Besoyan (Little Mary Sunshine) kids the things he loves and loves the things he kids. It is a diverting trifle with glints of moon madness.

Helena loves Demetrius who loves Hermia who loves Lysander. Bottom is a timid bachelor who despairs of finding an old-fashioned girl and carries a torch for his long-lost mother ("Oh, Oedipus Rex, you're so right! right! right!"). When romantic moondust falls on all the wrong parties, the enchanted wood near Athens fills up with entangling misalliances.

Besoyan and his fetching cast are more mimics than satirists. Babes is pretty distant from William Shakespeare, but not from the humor of his groundlings. And when it comes to two amiably mind-free, cheerily untroubled hours in the theater, almost all playgoers are groundlings.

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