Word: ado
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Furthermore, there is an unusual imbalance in the proportion of prose to poetry; Much Ado has fewer lines of verse than any other work in the canon except the farcical Merry Wives of Windsor. And the best writing in the play is in prose...
...directional debut with the American Shakespeare Festival, Peter Gill has come up with a winner. His Much Ado About Nothing is quite something--both for the ear and the eye. Bernard Shaw referred to the work as "Much Adoodle-do" and branded it "a shocking bad play." That's going too far. But it is a minor work. Its borrowed main plot is preposterous and flawed; and Shakespeare was pretty careless now and then (twice he even calls for Leonato's wife Innogen to come on stage, though she neither speaks nor is ever spoken to or about...
...must not be too hard on Much Ado. Just as Shakespeare needed the experience of writing the inferior Love's Labour's Lost before he could produce this middling play, he had to write Much Ado and the similarly middling As You Like It before he was able to follow them up with the miraculous gem he called Twelfth Night. Still, Gill and his charges had me believing for a stretch of two-and-a-half hours that Much Ado is really a good play--and that is no mean achievement...
...keyword to both the play and this production is balance. Much Ado, like the other plays in Shakespeare's Renaissance style (as opposed to his Mannerist and Baroque styles), exhibited a good deal of symmetry. The central tragicomic Claudio-Hero plot is balanced by the high comedy of Beatrice and Benedick and the low comedy of Dogberry and Verges. The evil bastard Don John is a foil to his genial legitimate brother Don Pedro; and these young brothers contrast with the older-generation brothers Antonio and Leonato. Don John's two male attendants (Borachio and Conrade) balance. Hero's female...
...Note--"Henry V" continues' through early September in alternation with "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Hamlet," and will be joined in late July by Chekhov's "The Three Sister." The other productions will be reviewed in subsequent issues. The drive to the picturesque Festival grounds on the Housatonic River takes about two and a half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike, Interstate 91, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Exit 32 or 31. Performances in the air-conditioned Festival Theatre traditionally tend to begin most promptly at their designated hour. There are free facilities for picnickers on the premises...