Word: leonato
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...landscape of the Chianti region of Tuscany, as painted by the local governor, Leonato (Richard Briers). Then the camera pans to the real thing: a paradise of green and brown hills -- life outshining art -- on which his handsome family idles. The rest of this film of Much Ado About Nothing has the same seductive impact as the first shot does. It brings sunny vitality to an old canvas...
...Leonato, Ben Vilhauer labors under some of the most difficult verse in the play. He makes the most of a drab and demanding part. Leonato's daughter, Hero (Janine Poreba), who keeps a low profile throughout the play, blossoms in the wedding scene. Her maidenly blush and swoon are entirely convincing. The audience can detect a difference in her after her trauma: the demure lass has aged into a deeper, more mature character...
What, then, are these atrocities performed upon Shakespeare's defenseless classic? First, Sellars has combined the roles of Leonato and Friar Francis into a new character named "Monsieur Love" (Chris Clemenson)--not a mortal sin, since the new character lives up to his fabricated name by playing matchmaker, always presiding over some new combination of lovers, and since Clemenson plays the part with a consistently benign, endearing manner...
...epigraph for John Anthony Burgess Wilson's new novel is taken from a stage direction in Much Ado About Nothing: "Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio and Jacke Wilson." It is appropriate because there is nothing in the field of fiction this Jack Wilson does not do. His prodigious career has already accounted for 15 novels, five books of criticism, hundreds of reviews and essays, all published since 1956, when Burgess...
There is some variation, of course. Tony Thomas' Messenger is too studied in speech. On the other hand, the best delivery in the whole show comes from William Glover's warm Leonato; so skillful is he that he sounds as though he had spoken nothing but Shakespearean English all his life...