Word: ado
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...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...
...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...
...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...