Word: ado
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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...
...President "prostitute his dignity" to discuss matters personally with the sit-ins. That was all Lyndon wanted to hear. Shortly thereafter, White House guards hauled the sit-ins off to jail. Orders from Johnson followed instantly: from now on, any such demonstrators were to be tossed out without any ado...
Stratford's Richard III is equally unsettling. As Douglas Watson plays him, Richard is monstrously twitchy but uncomplicatedly gleeful, a modern rather than a medieval sicknik, never giving the sense that he really loves evil for its own sake. The company's Much Ado About Nothing, on the other hand, is the best evening for sale at Stratford this summer. Riotous and briskly paced, with leafy sets, garden-party costumes and lighthearted acting, it goes some distance toward being the dish of sherbet that Much Ado should...