This production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” looks real good. And not just because the cast includes Christina Ricci, Bebe Neuwirth and at least two guys who can’t act but have spectacular chests.
The thing you’ll remember most is the snazzy wall of mirrored tiles that hangs over the stage at an angle and gives a bird’s-eye view of the action.
And there’s a lot of action to cover, even for a play known for its comedy, romance, mistaken identities, magical juices and supernatural high jinks. At times, you wish director Tony Speciale and his crew would take a chill pill.
Even Neuwirth and Ricci didn’t seem entirely at ease with the mayhem at a recent performance.
Neuwirth is a master at poker-faced imperiousness — see “Frasier” and “The Addams Family.” But aside from a mesmerizing scene in which she simply moves her shoulders, she lets her costumes do the acting.
You can’t entirely blame her. As the Amazon Hippolyta, she’s decked out in a leather hunting suit that makes her look like a vampiric Emma Peel. The outfit shrinks to a bustier when Neuwirth becomes the queen of fairies, Titania, here more of a dominatrix ringmaster.
As for Ricci, who made a solid stage debut in “Time Stands Still,” she’s game, but her Hermia is never more than a shrill rich girl. At least she’s well-matched with her friend and rival Helena, played by Halley Wegryn Gross with bubbly gusto worthy of “Scary Movie” star Anna Faris.
A pair of idiosyncratic performers with a following among fans of downtown gender-bending fare a lot better.
The first is the fabulous Taylor Mac, who plays the trickster Puck like a gentle, bearded fairy of the radical kind. He even gets away with ad-libs, as when he urges an audience member to hurry up with his ukulele: “There’s this thing called stage urgency.”
The second of this show’s assets is David Greenspan — the master of controlled camp — as Francis Flute, one of the amateur actors who put on “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the play-within-a-play. He’s simply breathtaking when taking on the female part of Thisbe, and he doesn’t resort to drag.
Here and there are some amusing touches: Hermia sleeps curled up inside her suitcase; the “herb” Oberon (Anthony Heald) talks about comes in a baggy.
But the brouhaha doesn’t gel into a coherent whole, and even sucks out the play’s poetry and sensuality.
Until the very end, that is, when they miraculously surface during the staging of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” The pace slows down, and both the jokes and melancholy are earned. The show needed a hit of that fairy dust much earlier.