Twenty years of renaissance faires, nine Shakespeare adaptations, and exactly zero stage partners — Dan Kostelec of Shakespeare Approves! is bringing his award-winning solo act to Fringe, and he needs the audience to do most of the heavy lifting. Catch Shakespeare’s “Midsummer: A Gaye Olde Tyme (Almost A Musical)!” at Strange Birds on Friday, October 2 at 6:00 PM or Monday, October 5 at 6:00 PM.

Fully audience-interactive and built for people who swear they hated Shakespeare in school, this one pulls you out of your seat and into the story. Ahead of his Scranton show, Dan was gracious enough to take a break from his busy ren fest summer season to talk with us about ren faires, ADHD, and why same-sex pairings became the engine of the whole show.

In your own words, what is your show about?

“Midsummer: A Gaye Olde Tyme (Almost A Musical!)” is, at its core, about love in all of its forms; it’s about diversity and why that is both needed for our society and is needed to be seen onstage (or onscreen); it’s about inclusivity and feeling included; and it’s also just here for a good laugh and a good time — because if the audience isn’t laughing, if they’re not enjoying themselves, then in the end none of the messaging actually matters.

What sparked this piece?

My wife wanted me to do something based on “Midsummer.” I primarily perform at renaissance faires and festivals, and every couple of years I work to add a new play inspired by Shakespeare into my repertoire. I have “Macbeth: Death By Fluffy Kittens!” and “Julius Caesar: Beware the Ides of March of the Penguins!”, to name just two of the nine pieces I currently rotate through.

So just like with the other plays I’ve already adapted, I started throwing spaghetti at the wall with the audience, seeing what would work and what falls flat. During the 2020 lockdowns I got the chance to sit with the scripts and start revamping them, and that’s when this piece really started taking its current form.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Some of Shakespeare’s best jokes and concepts came about because of what he had to work with, the parameters of what the Renaissance-era English stage would allow — and it’s the same for actors, playwrights, and directors today (and I like to flatter myself that I’m in all three categories). When your audience at a ren faire is predominantly women, and you need to pull various audience members onstage to play the parts in the show, then having same-sex relationships be a part of the story, and not just the traditional pair-ups, really allows itself to become a driving force for both the story and the comedy.

In the end, everyone wants to see themselves reflected positively onstage, and that’s what this show is trying to do.

What does “Fringe” mean to you as an artist?

Experimentation without a safety net.

I’ve long been a fan of throwing ideas at the wall live in front of an audience and going with what works, tailoring my show to their live reactions and then working from there, and being able to do that at renaissance faires and festivals for 20 years has been completely invaluable. But for a ren faire, everything is in a shorter time slot, a briefer period. You’re making a show that, usually, has to fit inside of a half-hour time slot, so you’re in the end making something that is closer to a standard sitcom length, 22-25 minutes.

Doing a show with the intention of having it on stage at a Fringe Festival allows me to go bigger: bigger with jokes, giving characters and ideas more time to breathe, adding in characters, themes, and ideas that just don’t fit inside of a half-hour presentation — and it still allows me the room to experiment! Fringe is all about getting discovered, but not just an audience or a producer discovering the artist’s work and allowing them to have more exposure or opportunities. It’s also about the artist discovering the audience: what works with them, seeing what gets a big laugh every night and what may be just a joke for one performance only.

The discovery and experimentation is the exciting part to me.

What do you want someone to feel — or think about differently — after seeing your show?

I like to joke that I want people to walk away from my show thinking, “Well, that happened. It was certainly a use of my time.” But in all seriousness, I want people to be delighted. Not just to enjoy themselves, but be actually delighted, to go to dinner or drinks after the show and want to talk about it, to relive it, to come back to it again and again in some form. I want them to walk away with a new idea germinating in their head, to want to watch something else inspired by Shakespeare, to maybe be inspired enough to go and create something of their own.

What’s been the hardest or most surprising part of making this?

Personally? Getting started. I’m an adult with ADHD, only actually diagnosed in the last few years, and that means I often have shiny-thing-syndrome: I’m relatively easily distracted by the next idea, the next shiny thing, sometimes just a cat — and that keeps me from getting things done, or sometimes even started.

Logistically? Finding the contacts, keeping all of the balls in the air, basically doing all of the work that a team of people usually does but mostly by myself. That’s the blessing and the curse of being a self-employed full-time creative: your workday sometimes never ends and you don’t know what you don’t know. But I’m so very thankful for all of the people involved with the Scranton Fringe Festival who’ve been helping to make this part of the process just a little easier! Marketing classes, social media folks, podcasting to get out the word, invites to advertise the show on First Fridays… it’s made a ton of difference.

Creatively? Knowing when it’s done. I have been doing some of my sets for 20 years, and I never quite know when they’re done. There’s always a new joke, a new way of saying something, that becomes a little more relevant to the audience. So with this? Part of me says that it’ll be done when I get off of the stage in October. Part of me knows that it will NEVER be done.

Anything else you want people to know before they walk in?

This is an audience-interactive show. What that means is it requires everyone’s help, whether you’re pulled up onstage as a member of the cast or you remain in your seat but help give some dramatic music, this is a group project. I don’t have a stage partner: it’s just me and you. So I ask everyone to bring their A-Game — and be willing to be silly for an hour.

Catch Shakespeare’s “Midsummer: A Gaye Olde Tyme (Almost A Musical)!” at Strange Birds on Friday, October 2 or Monday, October 5, both at 6:00 PM, as part of the 2026 Scranton Fringe Festival. Buy tickets here. Thanks to Dan for the laughs and the honesty — grab a friend, bring your A-game, and we’ll see you in the audience.