Swingin’ the Dream – Royal Shakespeare Company.

Swingin’ the Dream, streamed by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

If a jazz retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring incredible swing music opened at a theatre near you, you would go check it out, wouldn’t you? Especially if it combined popular hits such as ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ and ‘Jeepers Creepers’ with incredible original compositions including the now-ubiquitous ‘Darn that Dream’. And double especially if its triple-figures, largely African American cast included such superstars as Louis Armstrong and Maxine Sullivan.

For whatever reason, 1939 Broadway audiences were not so keen and Swingin’ the Dream closed soon after its opening, leaving behind nothing but a handful of songs and scant fragments of the script as clues it ever existed at all. The Royal Shakespeare Company has teamed up with London’s Young Vic and New York’s Theatre for a New Audience to attempt to piece the show back together. This livestream is a short concert version of their work-in-progress.

As the cast members tell the backstage story of the musical, they make clear the racial injustices prevalent at the time, and the show’s commercial failure becomes less of a mystery and more a tragedy. In the 1930s – when it was forbidden for two black actors to even sing to one another in a film – a show as forward-thinking as this one had a lot of hurdles to jump.

The entertainment industry still has a long, long way to go in addressing its deep-seated racial issues, but this black-led revival of Swingin’ the Dream could be a spectacular moment on the march toward musical theatre’s atonement. Excitingly, it looks like things are coming together nicely. Enough of the script has been salvaged to piece together a plot. As it is narrated here, the book sparkles. Humour is front and centre – indeed, popular comedian Moms Mabley played Quince in the original production – and the changes made to Shakespeare’s story to reframe the story from an American perspective are fascinating.

Even with only a five-piece band, the music is stunning. The cast don’t have time for many musical numbers during this short concert, but among others we are treated to the bouncy and catchy title track, an eerie and atmospheric ‘Voodoo Wood’, a knockout rendition of ‘Darn that Dream’ by Zara McFarlane, and a couple of spirited instrumentals to evoke the spectacular lindy hop and jitterbug dance routines they once supported. The medium of jazz is well-suited for this particular Shakespearean story: it can be light and playful, but its complex harmonies and unexpected rhythmic twists and turns echo the slightly unsettling, mysterious feel of the Bard’s magical woods.

The show’s finale is of course the Rude Mechanicals’ performance of their play-within-a-play based on Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe, presented here as a hilarious jazz medley. The cast don silly outfits and ham up their performances delightfully as they deliver stone cold classic song after stone cold classic song. A little cheesy, perhaps, but it is uplifting to see the performers have so much fun with such established material.

Pyramus and Thisbe’s tragic separation by a wall is turned into a social distancing joke of course. The intrepid team reconstructing this musical is fully respectful of the source material but is not letting reverence suck any joy out of the piece. Our world is different to the one in which Swingin’ the Dream first opened – and this revival will be different to the lost original too – but with their focus on recapturing the energy and spirit of those 1930s innovators, this concert is a tantalising glimpse at a future hit.

Ian Bowkett