Word: sellarsization
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WATCHING PETER SELLARS' Much Ado About Nothing is like walking across a room blindfolded--it's easy if you're well acquainted with the terrain but painful and confusing if you're not. Sellars has assaulted Shakespeare's script with the aid of a talented but small troupe, and of...
For Sellars has brutally mashed Much Ado About Nothing's script to fit the limits of his acting company and his own self-indulgent desire to buck conventionality. His innovations in staging are often clever and amusing, like his use of several mannequins to fill various roles for which he...
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...
MUCH WORSE, indeed Sellars' biggest blunder, is another combination of roles, this one of Don Pedro and Don John. Admittedly, these characters are some of Shakespeare's more faceless, Don John in particular being the classic villain-without-a-motive. That doesn't excuse the complete merging of the two...
This particular actor-saving ploy on Sellars' part costs him an entire half of the play's plot. No one in the audience who has not read Much Ado About Nothing beforehand can make sense of the main romantic plot of Claudio (Paul Redford) and Hero (Grace Shohet) without the...