A Midsummer Night's Dream Compare And Contrast

I had an amazing experience watching the production of Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream this past Sunday. Although there were many differences between the opera I had seen at the CFA and the A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream film directed by Michael Hoffman, it was still very enjoyable.
Although the lines were the same from Shakespeare’s original play used in Hoffman’s movie, there were many changes that had occurred the biggest one being the time period. In Hoffman’s movie, the setting was in the 1500’s, while Britten’s opera was made to take place around the 1950’s. Britten’s opera was also a lot more colorful than Hoffman’s movie, which tended to have a lot more natural coloring. Britten’s opera in general seemed to be more flamboyant in general compared to Hoffman’s movie. Where Hoffman’s movie was more serious with subtle comedy attempting to be as realistic as can be, Britten’s opera happened to have exaggerated movements on purpose in order to directly derive comedy in order to make the audience laugh. It did a good job of making

One of them was the fact that John Goodfellow turned Nick Bottom into an ass as an act of playfulness. In Hoffman’s film, the reason John Goodfellow turned Bottom into an ass was because he purposefully wanted Titania to fall in love with something hideous and since Nick Bottom was around her bed, he saw the perfect opportunity to do so, in order to please his master, Oberon. This is different from the opera where John Goodfellow turns Bottom into an ass on a whim of trickery. Another difference I noticed was that in Britten’s opera, Lysander gets lost in Brittenland, which was not a scene in Hoffman’s film, nor a place. What I hadn’t realized until I read BU Today’s article, CFA Stages A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was that the first scene was completely cut out of Britten’s opera, which originally focused on Theseus and Hippolyta in Hoffman’s