Word: ado
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...True, one hears stories of the bricklayer who succumbed to aggravated ennui while completing its masonry and was mistakenly immured there in. But there are good reasons to discount the testimony of those who claim to have heard his terrifying, ceaseless yawns. Things have changed, however, and the Much Ado About Nothing which the Harvard Dramatic Club is offering us these evenings gives every indication of a troublesome haunting. This amateur spiritualist, for one, suspects that the production may be infected by restless remnants of last week's faculty meeting, for it is as short on clarity...
What credit for the state of this Much Ado that does not lie with the spirits must be lodged squarely with director Kenny McBain and his design staff. The actors are uniformly competent, and a few considerably more, but it would serve little purpose to discuss their work in more detail here. The effort is marred not by any deficiencies in performance, but by an ineluctable thinness of dramatic conception which the best performances could do little to amend or disguise...
...Avengers, play two of the lovers as hot-blooded, impulsive adolescents; they are supported by Michael Jayston, a four-year veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Helen Mirren, one of the group's youngest leading ladies, who is currently touring the U.S. in Much Ado About Nothing. Hall's fairies are earthy and dirty-faced. His Titania (Judi Dench) is frankly "wicked, sexy, and erotic," and appears throughout covered only by a few leaves, a degree of nudity unusual on U.S. TV but perfectly natural in Shakespeare's lush forest setting...
...well-dressed man in Much Ado escapes a band of small-town hecklers by clambering to the top of a palm tree. There he turns himself into the latter-day equivalent of a 5th century pillar hermit. He promptly sheds all his clothes, capers among the fronds, and calls down unintelligible holy statements. Comments the narrator: "I could not resist a vague intellectual empathy toward the man who was now an abstraction - who had triumphantly nullified himself; who had attained the apex of an axiom." Similarly, in the title story, a "reliable, law-abiding, practical man" suddenly sloughs...
...done by long and dedicated hard work without any pronounced help from lady luck. In the early seasons of the Festival, Colicos was just one of the many actors doing yeoman service in small parts. From Lodovico in Othello, Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice, and Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Colicos was advanced to the important supporting roles of Laertes in Hamlet and Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream. Then, in the final offering of the 1958 season, he was entrusted with the central role of The Winter's Tale. His Leontes was flawed...