2015 marks a big year for the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival [PBSF]. Since 1990, PBSF’s Shakespeare by the Sea has brought the brilliance of the Bard to northern Palm Beach County with free plays during the culturally lean month of July. So entwined in Jupiter’s cultural landscape, for the quarter-century mark of PBSF, the Shakespearean cup has runneth over into the winter for a preview of what’s to come. On January 16 and 17, PBSF will take over Palm Beach Gardens’ outdoor amphitheater at Veterans Plaza for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival twist, of course.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been one of Shakespeare’s most accessible comedies, with a cast of fascinating characters and multiple plot lines woven intricately together. 
The audience will quite literally follow the characters from the courts of Athens into the fairy-enchanted woods, where a tangled web of storylines intermingle as puppet master Oberon, the fairy king, mistakenly casts a spell on the wrong couple through his minion, Puck. Forbidden love is approved, new relationships form and redemption comes to fruition in what Puck would like all to believe is a dream.
PBSF’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will pick up the pace with an adapted version of the play from Trent Stephens. But though an adaptation, the play doesn’t lose that Shakespearean allure. As Stephens puts it, “it moves quickly, but keeps all the elements of beautiful prose, humor, and of course, the magic of falling in love.”
Part of the PBSF’s quarter-century celebration, the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is but a primer to this summer’s Shakespeare by the Sea, when the granddaddy of all Shakespeare plays, Hamlet, takes the stage July 9-12 and 16-19.
- Admission to A Midsummer Night’s Dream is free.
- Showtimes: January 16 and 17 at 7 p.m. at Veterans Plaza Outdoor Amphitheater (10500 North Military Trail, Palm Beach Gardens).
- For more information, visit pbshakespeare.org.
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