A Dream Comes True

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One of the most well attended, exciting and energy driven Hollywood premiers within recent memory is for the film A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935). The story for this production began a year earlier with 'Max Reinhardt''s stage production of the William Shakespeare comedy. Upon seeing this stage production, Warner Brothers executives immediately signed Reinhardt to co-direct this film adaptation with William Dieterle. One of the more elaborate sets created on the studio sound stage was the immense forest where most of the movie's action takes place. Studio technicians scoured the country for unusually shaped trees for the set. The star studded ensemble cast includes James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, Dick Powell, Jean Muir, Victor Jory, Hugh Herbert, Anita Louise, Ross Alexander, Verree Teasdale, Frank McHugh, Grant Mitchell, Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney and Ian Hunter. Another set of important crew/cast members are Bronislava Njinska and Nini Theilade, who choreographed and performed the lyrical ballet sequences, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold who arranged the famous Felix Mendelssohn score. The hazards of the set, which included temperamental animal actors and overheating on stage due to the abundance of lighting used, were worth it for the magical final product.