Word: ado
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...analogy with Pinocchio. The Italian name is properly spelled Petruccio, and the Shakespeare Folio made it Petruchio precisely to provide a phonetic spelling for English-speaking actors. Thus it should be pronounced with a ch-sound as in "church." (The identical situation obtains with the name Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing.) Furthermore, Shrew's verse requires, except in three or four lines, that Petruchio be trisyllabic (just as it is in Italian...
When in Rome, she does as she always does. There were some boos after the first act of a gala opening-night Norma in 1958, and Soprano Maria Callas stomped out without further ado. So the Rome Opera canceled her contract for three additional performances. Their mistake. The reason for her hasty exit, said La Callas, was a sore throat, and a Roman court that examined her medical certificates agreed. The opera management now has to honor her original contract and pay the diva $2,800 for the operas she didn't sing. With Callas, even silence is golden...
Like many another old comedy, Much Ado About Nothing has become long of tooth, even longer in the playing, and short of run. So what to do with Much Ado...
...Much Ado, Zeffirelli decided to keep the setting in Sicily's Messina but to update and garlic up the performance with farcical sight gags, snatches of Puccini, and Italian-accented iambics. Don John turns up with a twitch, Bene dick (Robert Stephens) in sunglasses and Don Pedro (Albert Finney) dangles his cigar as if he were a successful Mafia leader...
...make so public a fool of himself." But the Observer, among others, decided it liked the prosciutto fine: "Not for years has the human substance of Shakespeare been refleeted like this." The public apparently agreed. Last week, after a month in the repertory, the National Theater's Much Ado was still selling out even the standing room back of the stalls...