DRAG RACE MidTangent glams up the Bard.

Photo: Adam Veness

Oh, Queer Tale. You had us till good-bye.

For a full two hours, Lewis’s genderfucked tweaking of Shakespeare’s fairy-infused fairy tale, in its fourth and reportedly final summer appearance, is fresh, inventive fun. It almost certainly requires the audience to be at least passingly familiar with the traditional Midsummer, but this adaptation—in which the fairy queen is a drag queen, Lysander’s a dyke, Helena’s a homo and Oberon, king of the fairies, is a woof-worthy leather daddy—works better than most contemporary pop-culture recastings. Replacing the Wood with the ’hood (a sort of displaced-in-time Boystown), Lewis brings the Bard persuasively into the 21st century.

This year’s cast demonstrates remarkable charisma; even the Shakespeare newbies (and it’s clear many are) charm us enough that we ignore their relative amateur status. Standouts include Laura Skokan as a butch-lesbian Lysander, Emily Rogers as pansexual club-kid Puck and Adam El-Sharkawi as a pretentious Bottom (that’s the character’s name, we promise).

But it’s in the last five minutes that Lewis loses us. After two hours of frivolity, sexiness and general merriment, the Pyramus and Thisbe scene turns abruptly tragic. By no fault of actor Max Bever, who perfectly plays what he’s given, Lewis’s adaptation turns toward melancholy. While we see where he’s coming from, Lewis doesn’t earn it; we’re left a little deflated—after an evening of promise of new life, it turns out Lewis’s Midsummer ending is as, ahem, straight-faced as the original.