Ballet Arizona to present 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

Ballet Arizona to present ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

Crews are hard at work and costumes are being sewn. "We're in the run-up to production right now, so we are building scenery and costumes and rehearsing like crazy in all of these studios around us even as we speak," Michael Panvini said.

PHOENIX - Crews are hard at work and costumes are being sewn.

"We're in the run-up to production right now, so we are building scenery and costumes and rehearsing like crazy in all of these studios around us even as we speak," Michael Panvini said.

On Valentine's Day weekend, Ballet Arizona will present the original romcom, "Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream." The performance is under the process of being totally reimagined by the company's artistic director with all-new sets, costumes and stage designs.

"We had done the production before with rented materials, so we already knew all of the casting, how many costumes we were going to need to make and kind of the idea of the environment is what really sort of changed," Panvini said

Panvini, director of production for Ballet Arizona, says the scene shop and costume shop are both working overtime right now to produce 85 costumes and several scenery pieces that are going to be used in the production.

"We did a production of 'Firebird' last season and that kind of opened our artistic director's eyes to the possibilities of video projection and so what we are creating now is a full environment with video projection," he said. "We'll have front projection on a series of portals that define the space and we will have rear projection to create the backdrops, so we can create any forest any environment basically with the projections."

The last time Ballet Arizona undertook a redesign of this magnitude was with its now-classic "Nutcracker Ballet," which was deemed one of the top three versions of "The Nutcracker" in the country by The New York Times.

The show runs from Feb. 13-16.