The Bard and the boogie.

Shakespeare meets disco as a New York City theater troupe turns A Midsummer Night's Dream into a nightly party called The Donkey Show

With a new Donna Summer CD on the charts, That '70s Show picking up an Emmy, and Saturday Night Fever landing its multimillion-dollar platform shoes on Broadway in September, the endless disco revival is clearly stayin' alive. Indeed, to relive the heyday of Studio 54, one need only step into the glitter-ball confines of New York City's Club El Flamingo, where a lively new theatrical experience called The Donkey Show has set the tres gay Chelsea neighborhood a-boogying back in time.

"There's something about this music that inspires joy and memories," says the show's 23-year-old producer, Jordan Roth, who wasn't yet born when "Ring My Bell" and "You Sexy Thing" were putting the bump into the world's hustle. However, he says, "I think from my generation there's this fascination with disco and with that era. We sort of missed something."

The brainchild of codirectors Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner, The Donkey Show takes the story line of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream out of the Athenian forest and into a '70s nightclub. In place of the Bard's text, the lovers now lip-synch their journeys to a seamless collage of disco hits--from "Car Wash" to "Don't Leave Me This Way"--while audience members intermingle with the production's 12 cast members on the dance floor. Climaxing with the titular bacchanal, in which two Brooklynite "Vinnies" are transformed into a donkey, complete with gender-bending drag kings, a tutu-twirling Rollerina, and a peacock-feathered Tytania catapulted onto the shoulders of four buffed Speedo-clad "fairies," the presentation is an intoxicating mix of classical forms and modern imaginations.

"I knew something was really happening here," Roth recalls of his discovery of The Donkey Show last year in a wee Lower East Side performance space. As a work in progress, the show developed a cult following in its six-month sold-out run at RuPaul's old stomping grounds, the Pyramid Club. Says Roth, who returned week after week: "It addressed so many of the things I was interested in--theater, mainstream pop culture in a tongue-in-cheek way, dealing with issues of gender in a very loving way--that I found this show wanted to be produced in a larger way."

Although The Donkey Show marks Roth's debut as a theatrical producer, he is no stranger to the development of a hit. His mom, veteran impresario Daryl Roth, helped Angels in America to Broadway and is now presenting the smash off-Broadway hits De la Guarda and Wit. A native New Yorker, Roth can't exactly remember the first time he went to the theater: "Probably around [age] 4 or 5, but I can guarantee you I went with my mother." In the beginning, he says, "it was all about the Broadway musical. Sort of the textbook gay-boy story: The little blond boy whose mother takes him to see La Cage aux Folles. And he's dazzled."

Clearly time has dimmed neither Roth's exuberance for live performance nor his taste for all that glitters. A 1997 graduate of Princeton University, Roth seems determined to combine the best of his theater-philosophy double major. "I'm interested in blurting those lines," he says, "finding the party in theater and theater in the party." It must be working, because The Donkey Show has been extended through Halloween, with signs of boogying to the brink of the millennium.

Find more information about The Donkey Show at www.advocate.com

Drake is a freelance journalist and the writer-performer of the one-man play--and soon-to-be feature film--The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me.