Word: ado
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WATCHING PETER SELLARS' Much Ado About Nothing is like walking across a room blindfolded--it's easy if you're well acquainted with the terrain but painful and confusing if you're not. Sellars has assaulted Shakespeare's script with the aid of a talented but small troupe, and of the author's carefully pointed satires and balanced symmetries he has left only fuzzy outlines...
...Sellars has brutally mashed Much Ado About Nothing's script to fit the limits of his acting company and his own self-indulgent desire to buck conventionality. His innovations in staging are often clever and amusing, like his use of several mannequins to fill various roles for which he lacked actors; but the merging of more important roles, the cutting and chopping of important scenes, and the self-consciousness of each departure from Shakespeare unnerve the audience and often make the play's plot incomprehensible. Sellars might just as well have bounded on stage, done a headstand, cried "look...
This particular actor-saving ploy on Sellars' part costs him an entire half of the play's plot. No one in the audience who has not read Much Ado About Nothing beforehand can make sense of the main romantic plot of Claudio (Paul Redford) and Hero (Grace Shohet) without the separate Dons...
...actors will present William Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" July 4-7 and 11-14 at 8 p.m., an adaptation of two 1890s sex tragedies in "Lulu" July 18-21 and 25-28 at 8 p.m., Vladimir Mayakovsky's "The Bedbug" August 1-4 and 8-11 at 8 p.m., and an adapatation of Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle August...
...insisted William Metzger, a maintenance man on Three Mile Island. "I'm not afraid. I think these plants are safe." Asked Co-Worker William Wilsbach: "Do you think I'd work here if I thought it was dangerous?" In Harrisburg, Secretary Margaret Duffy dismissed the whole fuss as "much ado about nothing." Mary Anne Koehler, who is seven months pregnant, said she would worry a lot more about damage to her unborn child "if I worked in a chemical plant...