In staging the bigger Donkey Show, director Libonati is working with a 6-foot-6-inch disco ball, an expanded cast and a potential audience of 800 per performance. Her task, she says, is to make the story “as clear and as deep as we can. The show is spectacular, so a lot is cast members throwing focus [to the next scene]. We have to show the audience where it’s supposed to be looking. Lighting does that too.”

The performers in Miami’s Donkey Show come from widely varied backgrounds. Singer-songwriter Shira Abergel, who graduated from New World School of the Arts, has appeared in numerous plays, nightclubs and music venues; she’s playing Mia in The Donkey Show and was Hermia in Midsummer at New World. Her friend since elementary school, Stephanie Chisholm, is an aerialist who plays Tytania ( Midsummer’s fairy queen Titania), a disco diva who sports butterfly pasties. Leah Verier-Dunn, artistic director of the Moving Ethos Dance Company and a member of Herrera’s troupe, plays Helen/Helena — a role Herrera played in high school. Jimmy Alexander Arguello , who plays the fairy Cobweb, appeared on So You Think You Can Dance. Dancer-actor Rudi Goblen, a member of D-Projects, Camposition and Herrera’s company, plays DJ Rudolph Valentino.

They and their fellow castmates were chosen, Libonati says, because they have talent and an additional ability the show requires. “It’s the ability to be calm and focused, but to stand out within chaos,” she says.

Herrera, who has worked on nightclub stages, is getting back to her roots after focusing for the past few years on creating work for her namesake Rosie Herrera Dance Theater. Her style, she says, is “less Saturday Night Fever and more Michael Jackson.” In working on The Donkey Show, she dug deeper than just incorporating dances like the hustle and the bus stop.

“I wanted to look outside of ‘70s moves and look at movement qualities,” she says. “I looked at this idea of swag — how you carry your body.”

In conjuring a disco Dream, The Donkey Show is unabashedly hot and sexy. There is, of course, the double entendre title. Yes, it suggests the magic spell (here, the play’s “potion” looks suspiciously like cocaine) that causes Tytania to make love to a guy sporting a donkey’s head. But it also refers to the maybe-mythical Mexican donkey shows in which humans and donkeys reportedly have sex.

For Paulus, The Donkey Show is about transforming what it means to go to the theater,

“I have a strong interest in immersive theater,” she says. “Going out of the 20th century into the 21st, what is theater? Where does it take place? What does it look like? Is it a play on a stage in an auditorium? I fantasize that this is more like Globe Theatre, that people could be more like Shakespeare’s groundlings.”

Inger Hanna, a singer who plays the spicy Club Oberon hostess Pepper in The Donkey Show, is certain that the audience experience will be just as big as the Arsht production.

“Miami is bold. We do everything to the 10th power,” she says. “You go hard or go home.”