Word: benedick
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...with happy incongruity in Ted dy Roosevelt's America, this Much Ado was all gingerbread and gingham. Benedick smoked cigars, wore a boater and, as he is played by Sam Waterston, looked like a dyspeptic basset hound...
Beatrice (Kathleen Widdoes) was a budding suffragette who matched wits and, finally, lovers' wiles with Benedick...
...Waterston is Benedick to the last corpuscle. He brandishes his cigar like a swagger stick. He discovers his love half knowingly, but with astonishment nonetheless, like a child finding the tooth fairy's silver dollar. Kathleen Widdoes makes Beatrice a proper combination of cold wit and hot blood. When she exclaims, "I may sit in a corner and cry heigh-ho for a husband...
...evil Don John, who is the cause of all the trouble, Michael McGuire is aptly sourfaced. At the play's end, when John is reported to have been captured in flight and brought back, Benedick says, "Think not on him till tomorrow." But director Gill brings John on stage at once to participate merrily in the concluding festive dance. This is a glaring mistake; John is not to be so readily forgiven, nor exempted from the "brave punishments" Benedick promises to devise...
Gill's direction in general is admirably inventive, and he maintains a pace that is swift without bring pellmell. (I could do without the second intermission, too, which would leave the show in two sections of 60 and 75 minutes.) Particularly amusing are the two garden scenes, in which Benedick and Beatrice in turn are intentionally allowed to overhear the contrived conversation of others...