New Berkeley Shakespeare troupe debuts a new ‘Midsummer’ musical

Older theatergoers might do a double-take when they see that Berkeley Shakespeare Company is performing a musical version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

This is, of course, not the venerable Berkeley Shakespeare Festival that held court in the 1970s and ’80s before moving to Orinda and changing its name to the California Shakespeare Festival and then to California Shakespeare Theater. It’s an all new company with a slightly different name, founded not quite two years ago.

“Considering that nobody had actually taken the name Berkeley Shakespeare Company as a whole, it just felt simple, memorable and something that would bring people out to see the show,” says company cofounder Phillip Leyva.

It’s a new “Midsummer,” too. It’s the world premiere of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Musical!,” adapted and directed by writer Sonya Baehr and composer Thomas W. Jones.

“There’s such a range of music in this show,” says fellow co-founder Jennifer Gallagher, who plays Titania and Hippolyta and is coproducing the musical. “You’re going to hear everything from straight-up classical operatic music to jazz to rock and roll.”

Berkeley Shakes founders Gallagher, Leyva and Emily Newsome met while performing in Sonoma Shakespeare Avalon Players’ production of “The Taming of the Shrew” in the summer of 2021. They hit it off so much that the three actors decided to form their own theater company.

“I played Lucentio, Jen was Bianca, and Emily was Kate,” Leyva recalls. “There were a lot of positives, a lot of bonding, and at the same time, we were thinking to ourselves, if we were to put up a show ourselves, how would we do it? And that was the genesis of Berkeley Shakespeare Company. We didn’t have a name for the company at the time. We just knew that we wanted to do a show. And that show happened to be ‘Macbeth.’ Jen and I wanted to play the leads, and Emily was interested in directing.”

In forming the company, they were inspired in part by “The Living Document,” a Google doc created in 2020 for BIPOC theater artists to anonymously recount racist behaviors and practices at Bay Area theaters and to demand change. Berkeley Shakes was founded with a pledge to center JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) in its work.

“There was sort of a reckoning in the theater community, and a lot of theaters were shutting their doors for various reasons,” Gallagher says.  “It felt like it was an opportunity to start something that we could believe in and give opportunities and voice to underrepresented groups.”

“One of the big things about what we do as a company is ensuring that our actors are treated with kindness, that people feel safe when they come to work with us, and that they feel that they have a legit opportunity giving their talents to work with us,” says Leyva. “Especially folks who haven’t been afforded opportunities due to patriarchy and white supremacy and norms that have all grown out of that.”

That first “Macbeth” in December 2021 at Berkeley’s Old Finnish Hall was followed close at heels by “Much Ado About Nothing” last summer at the Kensington Community Center Amphitheatre and at Forest Meadows Amphitheatre in San Rafael, and “Twelfth Night” last December at Aurora Theatre. Now the company returns to Kensington for its first show that isn’t entirely straight Shakespeare.