True theatrical magic is rare.
Almost everyone knows A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it’s often the first Shakespeare play taught in high school. Shakespeare’s fairy-dusted romp through love, jealousy, and transformation is also regularly produced: at Stratford, the Dream in High Park, and in countless smaller venues.
It’s a reliable crowd-pleaser. I’ve seen many charming productions over the years, and I thought I’d exhausted its surprises—let alone its magic—long ago.
Boy, was I wrong. Director Graham Abbey’s production at Stratford’s Tom Patterson Theatre is the most immersive and thoughtful—and the most genuinely magical—- A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I have ever seen. It doesn’t simply deliver the play’s familiar pleasures: it excavates depths I didn’t know were there, in order to stage a procession of delights that amaze, surprise and enchant.
I can’t recommend it highly enough.
For the unfamiliar: a quick overview of the play
A Midsummer Night’s Dream weaves together three overlapping worlds of relationship turmoil:
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The court of Athens is ruled by Theseus (Evan Buliung), who will soon marry Hippolyta (Ijeoma Emesowum). Young Hermia (Vivien Endicott-Douglas) loves Lysander (Jordin Hall), but her father demands that she marry Demetrius (Thomas Duplessie) … who is himself pursued by the lovesick Helena (Jessica B. Hill).
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The four lovers flee into a forest populated by faeries who are ruled by monarchs Titania (Sara Topham) and Oberon (André Sills). They are currently quarrelling over a changeling child, which has thrown nature into chaos.
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Meanwhile, a troupe of lower-class tradespeople—the “mechanicals”—are in the forest rehearsing a comically inept romantic tragedy called “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe”. They will have the chance to perform it at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta.
When Oberon dispatches his mischievous servant Puck (Mike Nadajewski) to deploy a love potion, the wrong lovers are enchanted and transformed, and the chaos multiplies exponentially … before finding resolution in a new equilibrium.
The spell begins before the play does
In this production, the central stage sits bare, except for an otherworldly moon glowing above. Borrowing a trick from last year’s Winter’s Tale, Abbey begins with an atmospheric prelude that is not part of the play’s text, though rooted firmly in it. It shows us the dramatic origin of the changeling child (Vivienne Abbey) who is the object of Titania and Oberon’s custody dispute, which will cause the romantic chaos we are about to see. Instead of being mentioned but never seen, this changeling will be a vital and playful presence throughout the play, until her arc concludes in an exquisite tableau at the play’s end.
This riveting opening sketches two key elements of Abbey’s larger achievement. First, it transforms this bare space into an otherworldly, elemental realm of magic, where leaf-fronded faeries packing violas and carrying song slink through the audience, rise from below, and rhythmically insinuate themselves around the stage. We are immediately transported, and there’s much more such magic to come.
Second, and more radically, it announces the intent to slow things down and reconsider them. This production will plumb the depths of Shakespeare’s text, pull its deepest and most interesting implications to the surface, and use every tool of acting and staging to manifest it—all of it. This is just the first of many such delights.
Everything you love—amplified
The elements audiences know and love are all here … but heightened and made new. For starters, the malleable and mischievous Mike Nadajewski disappears into Puck. A sly, sinewy and kinetic constant, he pops up in unexpected places, interacts directly with delighted audience members, and gleefully eggs on and revels in the chaos he causes.
Michael Spencer-Davis’s earnest Bottom and Sarah Dodd’s gender-flipped Rita Quince anchor a truly wonderful mechanicals ensemble. It also features Aaron Krohn’s Francis Flute, Sara-Jeanne Hosie’s Snout, Steven Hao’s Snug and Michael Man’s Robin Starveling. In a typical production, Bottom is usually the undisputed star and focus, but here, careful time (and acting talent) is used to distinctly and deliciously differentiate each role. “Pyramus and Thisbe” is allowed to breathe … and inflates into the fullest, richest, and most magical form of its silliness.
The four human lovers who pursue each other through the forest are perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of Abbey’s approach to the text. Hill’s Helena—a role I’d never thought much about—is an absolute treat. She manifests with incredible physicality the full-bodied torture of her romantic distress … and pairs it with ultra-arch asides. Her brawl with Endicott-Douglas’s compact Hermia (which plays the “painted maypole” / “thou puppet” insults to the hilt) earned an ovation in the middle of the action. Meanwhile, Hall’s brash Lysander channels his Gilbert Blythe from last year’s Anne of Green Gables, but turned up to eleven: his ukulele-smashing, shirt-ripping ardor also drew spontaneous applause after what, in a typical production, feels like a standard dialogue-heavy sequence. Duplessie’s Demetrius matches him beat for beat (and rip for rip) in escalating absurdity.
And the physical intensity of the love spells—where characters are yanked upward like puppets, then crumpled into sleep—deserves special mention as well, for the way it refuses the easy, conventional “shrug-then-stretch-out” shorthand.
At the production I saw, the spontaneous ovations kept happening, and not just after the genuinely eye-popping fairy tableaux. Audience members unfamiliar with the play were repeatedly bowled over. And those like me who knew it well were delighted by these unexpected charms, surfacing from unexpected places in a familiar text.
The architecture of wonder
It takes a village (or perhaps I should say a forest) to manifest Abbey’s unhurried directorial magic … and Lorenzo Savoini’s set, Joshua Quinlan’s costumes, Kevin Lamotte’s lighting, and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design work in seamless concert with the actors to this end. The storm they conjure is staggeringly realistic: faeries wade through water projected onto and pouring off the stage. The mechanicals’ rustic wagon, carted from end to end of the stage, is a clever vessel for Bottom’s metamorphosis. And Theseus’s more staid, Victorian-garbed court perfectly bookends the flowing green-hued forest movement.
And amplifying this magic is a persistent, playful irreverence that has been threaded throughout. Oberon’s deadpan pronouncement “I’m invisible” is both a statement of magic and a wink at low-cost staging. Man’s slyly anachronistic piano accompaniment for “Pyramus and Thisbe,” Puck’s interactions with audience members, and countless other touches would seem to puncture the immersive illusion created by the actors and the production team … yet somehow strengthen it.
The rarest thing
God is in the details— and in this production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, every possible detail has been considered and collaboratively crafted. The result is a wildly creative, enchanting show whose nested layers of delight make it feel brand new.
This is the rare production that delivers on the yearning for true theatrical magic that we carry into every darkened house. Don’t miss it!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs at Stratford’s Tom Patterson Theatre through September 26, 2026. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
