Word: comely
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...come on. Besides, I just--ouch!--got a hair...
...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...
...Much Ado twice before. In 1957 Alfred Drake was the most brilliant Benedick I've ever seen (perhaps partly because Drake is also a singer); but Katharine Hepburn was just no match for him. Then Philip Bosco was a magnificently vibrant Benedick in 1964, but Jacqueline Brookes couldn't come close...
...background. His surprising accomplishment has been to elicit a new kind of balance: somehow he has managed to pull the rest of his cast up to the level of his Beatrice and Benedick, almost to a man. Although the text rises and sags, all the component groups of characters come across on a rather evenly balanced level; it is this that makes the play seem better than it really is. This Much Ado is a real company show. Just about everyone speaks cleanly, crisply, intelligibly, and with adequate projection; and there are precious few of those unintentionally ear-assaulting vowels...
...setting (stressed by the camera's motion), becomes more pointed in a ten-minute continuos track which follows their car as it passes a line of autos stopped on the highway. The horns that assault one throughout the scene act on them only as low-level irritation. When they come on the front of the line and discover that a car wreck (corpses strewn on the bank) is the cause of the delay, they simply accelerate past; the camera's move into high-angle, giving the shot of bloody bodies and smashed cars a mood of tragedy, is ignored...