Underwater with Miami City Ballet’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

With a grand statement, Miami City Ballet opens their 2024-2025 season with George Balachine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” For those connecting the dots, Balanchine choreographed a ballet inspired by William Shakespeare’s ethereal play of the same name, scored by Felix Mendelssohn’s music also titled after the play. What Miami City Ballet has premiered before, they bring back with vigor and polish. Their own take on the woodlands of the Fairie Kingdom? An underwater, coastal plane, nodding to their Florida roots.

The plot can be quite convoluted, even when reading the original text, so clarification is usually in order with a wordless ballet. The movements of their bodies can convey novels and epics themselves, but these movements originated from language. The act of translating the verbal to the visual has spurred creative invention for millennia. Here, we bear witness to another pillar of tradition; in both ballet and literature.

The play/ballet has fantastical elements, both existing in the world we know, and the unspoken mysticism that exists within nature. There is both human royalty and fairie royalty, and the plot begins when these supernatural beings (Titania/Dawn Atkins and Oberon/Alexander Peters) decide to enter two sets of humans wandering through their domain with a love spell. Their deliverer is the misanthropic Puck (Rui Cruz). When the spell goes wrong, both human men (Lysander/Chase Watosh and Demetrius/Damian Zamorano) love the same woman (Hermia/Jennifer Lauren), and they fight, leaving Helena (Taylor Naturkas) alone. Puck and Oberon eventually fix their mistake, placing the couples right again, and when the human Duke Theseus (Steven Loch) and his Queen (Hippolyta/Jordan-Elizabeth Long) find out these two matches were made, they decide to host a triple wedding, which is the entirety of the short second act.

Meanwhile in this first act, the trickster Puck transforms an unsuspecting human’s head into that of a seal (a donkey head in the original), and using the love potion, Titania finds him handsome. This seal man (Brooks Landegger) was a comic relief that the crowd loved. Personally, Landegger’s performance was a highlight of the night. When it comes to favorites, the best performance of the night was Rui Cruz’s Puck. As my favorite character in the source material, his translated, balletic character was refreshingly pleasing as Cruz lilted through the air with jumps and light steps. Even his costuming, clad in gold and leaves, was the best of the night.

I appreciated the endeavor by Miami City Ballet to change the setting of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from a woodland setting to an underwater setting, giving something unique to their particular performances of the seminal work. Titania’s throne was a clamshell, there was a seahorse section, and the donkeyman became a sealman. However, these smaller changes did not fully envelop an underwater theme like the company envisioned. In my opinion, it needs to take a step farther. There are butterflies still in costume on stage for this production. While there are sea butterflies, this is confusing to the average viewer. Maybe even the Fairie King and Queen’s costuming can lean more into underwater design. To truly make it their own, the tidal coasts should be even more front-and-center.

That is to say: Miami City Ballet’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is ethereal, funny, and a new pillar in the discourse and history of this work. Tickets are still available for their next showing of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Broward Center, November 1-3.