Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Much ado about love. When WWII Italian resistance soldiers stop to rest at Leonato’s villa, there’s courtship of all kinds. While Beatrice and Benedick hide their infatuation beneath witty barbs, Hero and Claudio race to the altar. Enter the malcontent Don John, bent on ruining the wedding. He nearly succeeds, but not before Beatrice and Benedick finally tell each other how they really feel. Kate Buckley (The Taming of the Shrew) directs Shakespeare’s sharp, smart comedy about men and women and what it takes to make love happen.
8:00 performance, August 15^th, 2009.

If you’ve never seen/read Much Ado About Nothing, click here for all you need to know.

                Once again, if you’re planning to see this play at Ashland you might want to skip this entry if you want to avoid spoilers.

                Much Ado About Nothing is performed outdoors on the Elizabethan Stage, and the evening we watched the weather was perfect. It was almost as if the set designer could somehow control the heavens, for the majority of the action occurred in the garden of Leonato’s Sicilian villa, and as the sun set and the stars began to appear the view was breathtaking.

                Kate Buckley set her version of Much Ado during World War II, which seemed a bit problematic to me when one of the major plots is a young woman being abandoned at the altar her betrothed suspects she isn’t a virgin. Her father again and again says he wishes she were dead. It seemed a bit extreme for a 20^th century reaction; but one of my travel companions (who claimed to be of Sicilian descent) did claim that this is exactly what life would have been like for Hero at that time in Sicily. Whether or not the extreme reactions on the part of Claudio and Leonato matched the time, this setting allowed Buckley to play some fantastic era-appropriate music (played on a phonograph, of course!) between scenes. At one point, the sound of airplanes flying overhead boomed from the speakers and all the characters began ducking and crouching. Every head in the audience turned upward, scanning the sky for bombers. It was very convincing!

                One of the things about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that I find fascinating is that each actor has multiple roles in different plays, so after your second or third play you start seeing a lot of familiar faces. Peter Macon, who had played Macbeth a few nights before, reappeared as Don Pedro. One of the witches played Beatrice. It was almost a bit of a game, picking out faces and figuring out where you’d seen them before.

                The most memorable scene was in Act II, Scene 3 in which Don Pedro, Leonato and Claudio discuss Beatrice’s desperate desire for Benedick. The emotions described are completely made up by these three tricksters as part of Don Pedro’s plan to get Beatrice and Benedick to fall in love. Benedick is in earshot, and is soon eavesdropping on the conversation while ineptly hiding behind pillars, furniture and garden plants – much to the amusement of the conspirators, who pretend they don’t see him. The whole scene is very funny, with Benedick rushing about like the World’s Most Incompetent Spy and the other actors winking at the audience the whole time. Finally, Benedick is cornered and will be seen if he doesn’t move, but there’s no cover – so he sprints across the garden and dives into a pond at the middle of the stage with a huge splash that sends water flying everywhere. It was a completely unexpected and original bit of physical comedy. 

                Of course, this scene is followed by one in which Hero and her maid servants convince Beatrice of Benedick’s secret love of her. I expected another great comic moment, something to equal Benedick’s head-to-toe dunking. Beatrice is carrying a basket of grapes, and soon she is eating them. Aha! I think. That’s where the funny’s going to be. I mean, you can do all sorts of things with food. But all she did was eat the damn grapes. I guess it was supposed to be kinda funny at one point that she was stuffing her cheeks like a chipmunk, but it wasn’t really noticeable. It was just sorta blah.
 

Photos taken by Jenny Graham.  Beatrice (Robynn Rodriguez) and Don Pedro (Peter Macon). 
Photo in upper left is Beatrice & Benedick (David Kelly).
 

                I did feel like Beatrice was a bit miscast. The role called for a lot of physical comedy, like the grapes mentioned above, and the actress (Robynn Rodriguez) just didn’t seem that into it. This was my first time seeing the play, so I don’t know how the role is usually done, but Beatrice was a lot more shrewish than I expected. When I read Much Ado I had pictured Beatrice as sharp-tongued, but charming and playful with her wit. Why else would everyone put up with her? But Rodriguez’s Beatrice was just mean, and came off as unpleasant. She also seemed a bit old for the role; I never did imagine Beatrice as a mature woman. 

                Much Ado About Nothing is one of the more popular Shakespeare plays, and it was fun to see it in person. Some elements of the show seemed off to me, but overall it was very entertaining. Maybe a 6.5 or 7 out of 10, if I were to rate it numerically.