Presented by Apollinaire Theatre Company
By David Greig & Gordon MacIntyre
Directed by Danielle Fauteux Jacques
Music Direction & Sound Design by David Reiffel
December 26th – January 18th, 2014
189 Winnisimmet St
Chelsea, MA
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Review by Craig Idlebrook
Perhaps we’ve never puked at the front door of our sister’s wedding or stolen and spent a mobster’s money on one weekend, but the effervescent play MidSummer makes us wish we had.
Because this play lacks anything resembling pretension, David Greig and Gordon MacIntyre’s well-crafted script and Daniele Fauteux Jacques’ pitch-perfect staging makes us recognize the low notes and high notes of our lives in this 95-minute yarn. There is something surprisingly universal about the story of a low-rent con artist and a desperate divorce lawyer who are thrown together for a lost weekend that enables them to find themselves, if only in the telling.
Thanks to the breezy and unforced delivery of the play’s two actors, Courtland Jones and Brooks Reeves, it is easy to feel drawn into a moment in time when the sad side of Edinburgh, Scotland is made beautiful with the chance affair of two lovers on a summer weekend. The ease of which this play captivates is most apparent in the deconstructed pop songs the two pause to sing throughout the show, each breaking your heart and leaving you saying to yourself, “I could have wrote that…but I didn’t.”
There is nothing new in this play that you haven’t seen in other rom-com scripts, and the production stretches itself thin when it tries to take on weightier matters of philosophy. However, at its sweet heart, MidSummer shows how a well-crafted love story can still take you back to a moment when everything seems possible in love for the brave and the stupid.
