'Much Ado About Nothing': A "Recovered" Report

 

[On 22 December 2020, I posted “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” a collection of pre-Rick On Theater performance reports for plays I saw in Washington, D.C., in the ’90s and ’00s. 

[All but one, that is.  One of the three reports wasn’t actually written at the time I saw the play.  That was Othello, which I saw at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in the early 1990s.  I had, in fact, never written a report on that production.

[As I explained in my introduction to that section of the post, I had some scattered notes, some comments I’d made in other contexts, and a random collection of very vivid impressions of the performance I saw that night.  I decided to try to create the report I might have written back then, using a little research to help remind me of details of the production. 

[I called the result a “recovered” report, on the analogy of “recovered memory”—which is defined as “a memory of a past event that has been recalled after having been forgotten . . . for a long time,” according to Dictionary.com. 

[I think it worked out well, so I’m going to try it again.  There’s one more play, from 1985 this time, that I saw at the Folger Theatre, the forerunner of STF, that left a strong impression and I’ve wanted to try to resurrect my recollection of the performance for a long time: Much Ado About Nothing.  In fact, I was going to “recover” that report for “Some Out-Of-Town Plays,” but I realized that one of the other two plays was another production of Much Ado.

[I put that idea aside temporarily, and now I’m going to revive it.  Let’s see what I make of it this time.]

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
by William  Shakespeare
Folger Theatre (Washington,  D.C.)
13 February 1985 

I’ve probably said this a dozen times or more on Rick On Theatre—and countless times orally whenever the subject of Shakespeare’s plays comes up—but I’ll say it again here, just so there’s no doubt: Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite Shakespeare play. 

It may also be my favorite play of all time, irrespective of genre, period, or classification, but I’d have trouble sorting that out.  When I was a (young) actor wannabe, I always wanted to play Benedick, but few directors would see me in that role.  I did get to play Don John, the play’s villain, in a very nice Off-Off-Broadway production of Much Ado in 1979.

The closest I got to playing Benedick, though, was doing a scene from Much Ado in an acting class in the mid-1970s.  (I’d have been just around 30 at the time.)  It was the act IV, scene 1 declaration scene in which Benedick and Beatrice declare their love for one another and she asks him to kill Claudio. (My partner was Jennifer Sternberg, another “mature” actor in the class.)

I’ve seen a great number of productions of Much Ado About Nothing over the years, including the 1993 film adaptation (about which I have mixed feelings) with Kenneth Branagh (who also directed and adapted the script) as Benedick and Emma Thompson as Beatrice.

The closest I seem to have come to a traditionally-set production was that Branagh film, which was set in an unspecified-but-vaguely-Renaissance Italy (though filmed in Tuscany rather than Sicily, where Messina actually is—but we aren’t to know that!).  It’s truly cinematic, rather than theatrical, but otherwise faithful to Shakespeare.  (The 2012 film adaptation by Joss Whedon, besides being made in black and white, is updated to a contemporary setting.)

Arguably, the staging that was the farthest from the original that I saw was the 2017 Shakespeare REMIX adaptation (see my report on this program on ROT on 31 December 2017) created and performed by the Chelsea Career & Technical Education High School of lower Manhattan.  Also reset in contemporary times, the plays Shakespeare REMIX participants work on comment on the students’ own lives and the times in which they live as they insert their own writing into Shakespeare’s text.  (I had previously seen Chelsea CTE’s Henry 4 remix in 2016.)

Chelsea CTE’s Much Ado About Nothing took place in New York City’s Messina High School, where “gossip fills the hallways, classrooms, and bathrooms.”  Yes, the set incorporated the school johns, including stalls! 

I also saw the London troupe Cheek by Jowl’s 1998 staging of Much Ado About Nothing (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater, now known as the Harvey), reset in the aristocratic climes of Edwardian England (about 1901-10), when the distinctions between the genders was rigid and absolute.

I don’t remember very much about the show—which gives you an idea of my receptivity to the production. I did, however, stop seeing Cheek by Jowl shows after that, it seems.  I’d seen a couple of the company’s performances before, though, and hadn’t much cared for them.

Much Ado apparently cries out to directors for a change of setting for some reason.  I saw a production on New Year’s Eve 2002 at the Shakespeare Theatre (a successor to the Folger Theatre) in association with the Hartford Stage of Connecticut.  (This was the archival Much Ado report I posted as part of “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” referenced earlier.)  It was directed by Mark Lamos, who reset the play in the Roaring ’20s (that is, right after World War I).

Everyone did a nice enough job and the costumes were terrific.  The show just didn’t sparkle, however, and I wonder if the laid-back era of the setting put everyone in that mind-set.  It was Shakespeare à la Noël Coward, if you can picture that.  If this weren’t my favorite Shakespeare (and if it hadn’t been New Year’s Eve), I might have objected more. 

The transportations can get farther and farther away from Shakespeare’s turn-of-the-17th-century Sicily.  In 2011 and ’12, the Shakespeare Theatre Company (the name of the company after it left the Folger’s Elizabethan theater) hired Ethan McSweeney to direct a new production of Much Ado About Nothing.  (See my blog report on this production on 19 January 2012.)  He reset the play to mid-1930s Cuba, at a time when the 1933 Sergeants’ Revolt brought to power a short-lived, reformist-but-unstable pre-Batista government.

McSweeney’s Much Ado took place on a sugar cane plantation and the designers clearly had a great deal of fun creating a credible evocation of Cuba in the ’30s, with the women’s fashions especially flattering and sexy.  The trade-off of the choice of period was that the military uniforms of Don Pedro and his soldiers were dull khaki jodhpurs and tunics, and lots of Smokey-the-Bear hats.  With the verdant hacienda set behind them, though, it was little enough for the men to give up the colorful and elaborate uniforms of the 16th or 17th centuries.

The production was fun, I’m happy to report.  STC has almost always been superb in its acting, directing, and design—even if I’ve occasionally disagreed with elements of the interpretation.  In this instance, the new locale and time didn’t illuminate anything in Much Ado that a more straightforward presentation wouldn’t have accommodated.

McSweeney’s Cuban relocation of Much Ado About Nothing was probably one of the most unusual among the professional productions I’ve seen.  (I make special allowances for the Shakespeare REMIX high school performance, given the educational philosophy behind the project.) 

I’ve read of some other interpretations that are “out there”:

·   A 1958 mounting at Stratford, Connecticut’s now-defunct American Shakespeare Festival, directed by John Houseman and Jack Landau with Katharine Hepburn and Alfred Drake as Shakespeare’s “merry warriors,” set in Mexican Texas during the Texas Revolution (1835-36)

·   A Franco Zeffirelli-directed camp Much Ado for London’s Old Vic updated as a Sicilian carnival with peanut vendors, carabinieri, and Italian accents (1965); Maggie Smith starred as Beatrice opposite her soon-to-be-husband, Robert Stephens, as Benedick

·   A New York Shakespeare Festival staging at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1972, set “[b]efore World War I [in a] small town in middle America” with Don Pedro’s men as Rough Riders and Dogberry’s watchmen as Keystone Kops; staged by A. J. Antoon, the production (which moved to Broadway and has been issued on DVD) starred Kathleen Widdoes as Beatrice and Sam Waterston as Benedick

·   A 1988 staging for the Public Theater (successor to the NYSF) by Gerald Freedman set during the early Napoleonic era (around 1800) at the Delacorte, starring Blythe Danner and Kevin Kline; part of the Public’s 10-year-long Shakespeare Marathon (1987-97; 37 Shakespeare plays)

Of all the incarnations of Much Ado About Nothing I’ve seen or with which I’ve been associated, perhaps the oddest is the one I’m going to try to describe and evaluate in retrospect, the 1985 production at the Folger Theatre directed by the troupe’s artistic director, John Neville-Andrews.

Neville-Andrews’s Much Ado About Nothing was, of course, staged in the Folger Library’s Elizabethan theater, the company’s home.  (See my afterword below for a brief history of this company and its many name-changes.)  It started previews on Tuesday, 15 January 1985, opened on Monday, 21 January, and ran until Sunday, 10 March.  I saw it on Wednesday, 13 February, with my parents. 

(Full disclosure: my father was at this time a member of the Folger’s board.  In addition, sometime in 1982—or thereabouts—I auditioned for the company in one of those omnibus audition sessions that groups of regional companies hold in New York City.  Sometime during the next year, Neville-Andrews was at dinner at my folks’ house and he offered me a part “if you’re available.”  I had to turn the offer down because I was committed to starting a graduate program at New York University that September.  I had determined by then to give up my pursuit of an acting career.)

The Much Ado production, which starred Mikel Lambert and Roderick Horn as Beatrice and Benedick, was set in the 1930s.  What’s more, the story unfolded aboard the luxury ocean liner S.S. Messina at sea.  This made it more reminiscent of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes than William Shakespeare—and raised at least one unanswerable question. 

The whole production was accompanied by music from Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, among other recognizable period songsmiths, as the play’s circumstances required.

I assume that most readers know the plot of Much Ado, but I’m going to give a brief summary for the few who don’t—and to apprise you all of the adjustments necessitated by setting the machinations afloat.

Don Pedro (Steven Crossley), a wealthy bachelor, and his entourage board the S.S. Messina for an Atlantic crossing, looking for fun and romance.  They and their fellow voyagers climb up a ramp from the house aisle with a band playing.  With him travel his friends Claudio (Michael Tolaydo) and Benedick (Roderick Horn).  Another passenger is Father Francis (Floyd King), a Bible-thumping Southern evangelist.

Also aboard are Don John (Edward Gero), a New York gangster and his henchmen Conrade (Alessandro Cima) and Borachio (Michael Howell).  However incongruous, Don John was Don Pedro’s brother, just as he is in Shakespeare’s original.

The gangsters are cartoon characters, figures of comedy almost as low as Shakespeare’s original clowns, the constable and his watch.  In keeping with the musical-comedy atmosphere director Neville-Andrews conceived, they’re more Kiss Me, Kate hoods (speaking of Porter—think “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”) than Guys and Dolls.

Below deck are Dogberry (Jim Beard), the ship’s purser (formerly a constable in Shakespeare’s original), and his bumbling cohorts Verges (Richard Hart), George Seacole (Stephen Hayes), Hugh Oatcake (Terrence Riggins), and Harry Starboard (Reginald Metcalf), who make up the ship’s crew. 

Balthasar (a singer in the original; Rob Bowman) is the tuxedoed lounge piano player, offering such period numbers as “Where or When” (1937, Rodgers and Hart), “The Lady Is a Tramp” (1937. Rodgers and Hart),“Tea for Two” (1924, Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar), “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” (1924, George and Ira Gershwin), “Night and Day” (1932, Cole Porter), and “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields).

Young Claudio is in love with Hero (Tara Hugo), the young daughter of Leonato (Emery Battis), who are also passengers on the Messina, while Benedick can’t stand Beatrice (Mikel Lambert), Leonato’s beautiful, witty, but sharp-tongued niece, who returns his disdain.  In Leonato’s traveling party is also Beatrice’s father and Leonato’s brother, Antonio (John Wylie).

Claudio and Hero are soon engaged; as they prepare for their wedding, they decide, with the help of Don Pedro and Ursula (Erika Bogren), Hero’s companion, to trick Benedick and Beatrice into confessing their love for each other.  The plan works without a hitch, but trouble comes in the form of Don John.  

Out of pure cussedness, Don John devises a scheme in which Borachio will make love to the gang’s platinum-blonde moll, Margaret (Hannah Weil), while calling her Hero, at the porthole of Hero’s cabin the night before the wedding.  

Don John takes Don Pedro and Claudio where they can see the encounter and are convinced Margaret is Hero.  The next day Claudio shames Hero publicly at the wedding and refuses to marry her.  She faints and Father Francis persuades Leonato to pretend that she’s dead until the situation is sorted out.

Dogberry manages to arrest Conrade and Borachio and they confess the plot.  Claudio’s crushed when he learns that he killed Hero with his false accusations.  He begs Leonato to punish him and Leonato tells him his punishment is to marry Antonio’s “other” daughter, who is “almost the copy of” Hero.  Claudio agrees but first spends a night mourning for Hero and proclaiming her innocence.

Don John escapes the Messina.  (How? you may well ask.  I have.)  The next morning, Claudio marries Leonato’s “niece,” who removes her veil to reveal that she’s Hero.  Claudio and Hero are very happy but Benedick and Beatrice almost break up when they discover they were tricked into admitting their love.  Benedick and Beatrice get married, however, and everyone dances around the deck singing.

Father Francis, in the person of a pulpit-pounding King, officiates at the ceremony from a neon pulpit equipped with a flashing cross.

(In the end of Shakespeare’s version, Don John is arrested and brought back to Messina to face punishment, but Neville-Andrews seemed just to have forgotten him.  I’ve never figured out how the scoundrel got off the ship in the middle of the Atlantic.  Drop a lifeboat over the side?  A hidden jet ski?  Riiight! 

(Having generated that conundrum, I suppose bringing Don John back to face charges would only spotlight the logical disconnect—so best not to bring it up.  So the miscreant just skated. 

(I saw this play 36 years ago—and this has always bothered me.  I wasn’t the only one, either.  David Richards, the Washington Post reviewer, asked the same question in his 1985 notice.)

There were obviously textual changes and adjustments necessitated by Neville-Andrews’s idea.  For instance, the Folger’s script added such anachronisms as, “Places please, for the Hollywood ball,” when a crew member called the passengers in to the masked party in act II, scene 1. 

Most noticeably, Don John, whom Edward Gero played as a hood from Brooklyn, interpolated dese’s, dem’s, and dose’s into the Shakespearean dialogue.  Steven Crossley, by the way, is from England, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, though he works extensively in the U.S.  

One critic quipped, “From the sound of things, while Don John was running numbers as a young man in Brooklyn, his brother, Don Pedro, was probably studying at Oxford.”  It was sort of Damon Runyon meets Noël Coward.

The malefactor also shifted more of the Bard’s prose into Brooklynese: in act II, scene 3, Don John told his brother and Claudio: “De lady is disloyal,” and then, “. . . when ya have seen more and hoid more, proceed accordionly [sic].”

Alessandro Cima’s Conrade followed suit, of course, as one of Don John’s gang, but not Borachio.  Actor Michael W. Howell is African American and played Borachio with an black street accent.  There was a lot of laughter, some of it from the hoods’ take on movie gangsters, but some from the incongruity of hearing Shakespeare’s words in contemporary American street speech.

(Neville-Andrews’s Much Ado wasn’t the only Shakespeare I’d seen that went this route.  In 1988, the Off-Off-Broadway Independent Theatre Company Americanized its production of Romeo and Juliet by making the characters Italian-American in the Mafia vein.   

(This inspired particularly those playing the lower-class characters to affect Hollywood gangster accents.  Somehow, “What light t’rough yonda winda breaks?  It is de east, and Juliet is de sun!” just doesn’t ring right.  I kept flashing on the hoods in Kiss Me, Kate singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”)

The program doesn’t say who’s responsible for the emendation of the script, director John Neville-Andrews or dramaturg Genie Barton, who authored the “Notes on the Play” in the program.  Text adaptations are usually the job of a dramaturg, but in this instance, Neville-Andrews may have been at least largely in control.

There were loads of problems with this production because of Neville-Andrews’s “concept,” but one thing can’t be denied: it was a handsome and miraculous setting.  Designed by William Barclay and lit by Daniel M. Wagner, the Messina was a sleek, sparkling vessel that stretched across the Folger stage, the stern at stage right and the gleaming white starboard hull angled up to the left.

The miracle was that Barclay got a credible facsimile of the ship onto that tiny stage and still left (barely enough) room for the actors and their business.  It was cramped—but the Folger always was anyway—though serviceable.

One of the drawbacks of the Folger’s Elizabethan stage other than its tiny size was the permanent architecture around which every production and set design had to work.  (This was one reason that Michael Kahn, Neville-Andrews successor, eventually moved the company out of its longtime home at the library: it was extremely limiting.  The other principal reason was the small seating capacity of the Folger—243 seats in comparison to 451 seats in its eventual new space.)

This includes the inner stage and its overhanging “heavens” as well as the pillars downstage that blocked sightlines, made movement on stage awkward and limited, and got in the way of almost any set design with which a scenographer came up.  Remarkably, Barclay devised a plan that left the Elizabethan elements exposed while weaving the S.S. Messina in and around them.  A touch of Shakespeare peeking out from Noël Coward. 

The ship’s interior, modeled on the luxurious French liner Normandie (in service 1935-39), revealed up center by means of an inner stage on a turntable, was art deco and painted ocean blue.  The chairs in the ship’s piano bar were upholstered in zebra stripes and Bowman tinkled the ivories on a gleaming white grand reminiscent of Liberace (sans candelabrum).  The rest of the ship was all shined brass railings and fittings, with curved staircases connecting the two decks of the set.

Though Neville-Andrews’s concept turns Much Ado into a high-society comedy of manners for the screwball-comedy era, David Richards of WaPo asserted that it was “easily the handsomest Shakespearean production” the company had mounted so far in its history.

Needless to say, John Carver Sullivan’s costumes were equally ’30s-elegant, right out of Hollywood’s golden days.  The women’s gowns looked like clothes Ginger Rogers might have worn and the male passengers were mostly attired in dinner suits—except for Don John and his confederates, who dressed like refugees from a Jimmy Cagney flick in pinstriped suits, snap-brim fedoras, shades . . . and gats.  According to one account, director Neville-Andrews ordered 70 period costumes, including the crew uniforms and the mobsters’ pinstripes.

The masque scene, which is a party at Leonato’s house in the original, was a “Hollywood ball” aboard the Messina.  The revelers masked themselves as movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire (Benedick), and Rogers (Beatrice).  As Balthasar played such period numbers as “The Continental” (from the 1934 Rogers-Astaire film The Gay Divorcee) and “Hooray for Hollywood” (featured in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel), the partiers danced the latest Latin steps such as the samba, rhumba, and conga. 

Ursula did a Shirley Temple routine during the ball to the tune of “On the Good Ship Lollipop” (the child actress’s signature song which she first sang in the 1934 film Bright Eyes) which seemed unnecessary and unjustified.  The dances were choreographed by Virginia Freeman and the masks designed by Michael Eade.  Bowman, who played the pianist Balthasar, was also the production’s musical director.

But all this good-natured fun was problematic.  It didn’t greatly detract from the play, but neither did it add anything.  (In his review in the New York Times, Mel Gussow observed, “As a concept, a Porterized porthole version is, itself, much ado about nothing.”)  It may have been ultimately harmless, but it created some logic problems.  I’ve already raised the matter of Don John’s escape from the Messina and the omission of the scene of his arrest and return.

Before that, when Don John’s gunsels, Conrade and Borachio, were caught, Dogberry didn’t bring them to a ship’s officer to be examined, but to one of the passengers: Leonato.  Whatever for?  Leonato has no authority in this version of the play.

In Shakespeare’s version, Leonato is the Governor of Messina, so Dogberry is a minion of Leonato.  It makes sense for the constable to bring prisoners to his superior for questioning.  You might have expected Neville-Andrews to make Leonato captain of the ship here, but he didn’t; Leonato’s just a passenger.  So why would Dogberry report to him?  Aside from the fact that the plot needs it, I dunno.  Go figure.

Neville-Andrews established that the scenes between Benedick and Beatrice were played on deck at the ship’s railing.  Under Wagner’s daytime sun or evening moon, the setting created a warm and serene ambiance. 

In keeping with that convention, with the help of Wagner’s mood-setting moon- and starlight and Balthasar in the lounge playing “Poor Butterfly,” Horn in a tuxedo and Lambert in a sensuous evening gown declared their love and Lambert’s Beatrice swore Horn’s Benedick to be her agent in revenge against Claudio.

But the scene, which Shakespeare put in the church right after the aborted wedding (IV.1), Neville-Andrews moved to later that evening in order to take advantage of the moonlit setting.  The scene was lovely, both in the setting and the performances, so no harm was done to the play.  But it was a change motivated solely to accommodate the look—after the daytime wedding scene, the lovers couldn’t wear spiffy evening dress!—and the director’s whims. 

Whatever it accomplished dramatically—as written, the scene shows a mature couple, 10 to 15 years older than Claudio and Hero, forging a commitment in fraught circumstances while the unseasoned Claudio behaves rashly at the drop of an unverified allegation—the point wasn’t strengthened or emphasized.  It just looked prettier.  In fact, seen in the church where the marriage was to have taken place and where the offence was committed immediately before could make the scene more impactful than delaying it.

This kind of thinking didn’t seem to have entered into John Neville-Andrews’s consideration for conceiving this Much Ado.   For example, making Don John into a comic villain, a sort of Boris Badenov (from Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show, the ’60s era TV cartoons) as a gangster instead of a spy, stripped him of the true evil and destructiveness he brings to the original version of the play.  (I’ve frequently spoken of the character as “Iago-lite.”)

Then, in his “Director’s Note” in the program, Neville-Andrews asserted that “the thirties was an extremely joyous, optimistic and romantic era,” but he was ignoring the Depression (1929-ca. 1939); Prohibition (1920-33); the gangster era in the U.S. (around the late ’20s to the late ’30s); European dictatorships (Mussolini – Italy, 1922-43; Stalin – Russia/Soviet Union, 1924-53; Salazar – Portugal, 1932-68; Hitler – Germany, 1933-45; Franco – Spain – 1939-75); World War II and build-up to war (1939-45; 1923-39); labor unrest, riots, and revolts (1920s and ’30s).

Unless you’re oblivious to the upheavals of the decade, it’s impossible to call it carefree—unless you belong to the privileged moneyed class.  Or you believe the silver-screen image of the time depicted in the escapist fare projected by the film studios on both sides of the Atlantic.  Aboard a luxury liner at sea, you’re insulated from that real world, of course.

(In the same note, by the way, the Much Ado director observed that in “the physical constraints of ship life, no one can flee from confrontation.”  But, as I’ve noted, that was precisely what Neville-Andrews arranged for Don John to do, first when he mysteriously escaped form the S.S. Messina and then again when he wasn’t brought back to face his deserts.)

Furthermore, one of the aspects of Much Ado About Nothing is that it’s rooted in the real world.  There are no enchanted forest or magical creatures to manipulate or protect the characters.  Neville-Andrews’s S.S. Messina is, however, a world apart from reality ashore.  In addition to all those terrible events that I catalogued as going on out in the world, there’s also the world Shakespeare invoked for Much Ado.   

The Bard doesn’t ever say when Much Ado takes place.  One era scholars suggest is the mid- and late 13th century, the reign of King Jaume (James) I of Aragon (1208-76) and his son, Piero (Peter, or Pedro; c. 1239-85), who conquered Sicily and became king of both Aragon and Sicily.  Piero was an experienced soldier from fighting in his father’s wars.

It’s these wars from which Don Pedro’s “returning” in Much Ado, according to this origin theory—actual, historical wars in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.  But on the ship, these wars don’t exist.  The closest things, one writer suggested, in which Don Pedro and his men might have been engaged, unlikely though that would have been, would have involved “black sedans and submachine guns” in a Hollywood gangland. 

The performances were hard to judge.  The Much Ado cast included several Washington favorites, such as Edward Gero (who’s made several appearances on this blog) and Floyd King (an actor my mother always enjoyed), whose work I’d seen numerous times.  In the role of Antonio was also an actor, John Wylie, with whom I’d worked in New Jersey eight years before.

Neville-Andrews turned many of the aspects of Much Ado’s comedy that derived from wit and snappy language into buffoonery and clownishness.  Don John’s henchmen were subjected to this transformation, as I’ve already suggested, but Tolaydo’s Claudio and even Horn’s Benedick had to display a penchant for farce.

It's one thing for Claudio to be callow and immature, but Neville-Andrews made Tolaydo play him as a bumbling schlemiel.  It seemed out of place and unfitting.  Horn’s Benedick got it worse, however

In the overhearing scene (II.3), Horn started out concealed by a large menu then he squirmed under a table and crawled under the piano bench.  When a steward removed the menu, Horn hid under a tablecloth and finally ended up under a deck chair.  Pure slapstick—but more Inspector Clouseau than Benedick the Shakespearean lover. 

The actors executed Neville-Andrews’s vision well enough.  The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t handle it.  The question was, were they doing Shakespeare’s play . . . or something else.  In all those other variations of Much Ado I listed at the top of this report, no matter how far removed from Renaissance Italy their directors had moved the setting—they were still doing William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  I just wasn’t sure about the S.S. Messina. 

I didn’t feel that the Folger cast was.  The Times’ Gussow quoted Don John portentously: “Let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me” (I.3).  Richards of WaPo asserted, “About 50 percent of the time, the Folger Theatre seems to be on to a good thing—indeed, a snazzy thing—with its production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’” 

Richards continued his half-and-half appraisal through his notice.  “I’m not sure the approach makes sense down the line,” he caviled, “in fact, it makes no sense at all in some places.”  Later, he referred to “those recurring moments when Shakespeare’s Messina and the Folger’s SS Messina just don’t jibe.”

Another reviewer, Michael J. Collins, Emeritus Professor of English at Georgetown University, wrote: “Although it is sometimes thoughtful and illuminating, the Folger’s version of Much Ado About Nothing is finally not Shakespeare’s.”  I think I have to agree.

In a way, this was paradigmatic of the whole production.  It was silly, even funny—but it wasn’t Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Not only had the physical comedy replaced the verbal wit for which Much Ado is justifiably famous (and, I daresay, beloved), but Neville-Andrews undercut Shakespeare’s commentary on human vulnerability to gossip, inuendo, and malicious deception.

John Neville-Andrews’s interpretation of the play was truly “much ado”—that is, a great fuss—over “nothing”—that is, something of no consequence.  While an accusation of infidelity would have caused immense consternation in Elizabethan times—Elizabeth’s own mother lost her head over such an accusation, after all—in the swinging, sophisticated 1930s (especially in Neville-Andrews’s sunny rendering), would it even raise more than an eyebrow?

Furthermore, in Shakespeare’s day, nothing sounded much like noting, which at that time meant ‘gossip,’ ‘rumor,’ ‘overhearing.’  So “much ado about noting” would have meant ‘a big deal over gossip and rumor.’  There are two important elements of the play that come out of overhearing and rumor: Benedick and Beatrice are tricked into declaring their love for one another, and Claudio rejects Hero because of a false rumor. 

That suggests to me that Shakespeare intended the play to say something about our responses to false reports and things we hear other people saying.  (Much Ado isn’t the only play in which the Bard treats this issue.  It’s an important plot element in The Winter’s Tale, too.  If the playwright put this in two plays, don’t you think it’s significant?)

Reconceiving plays can have profound, and not always felicitous, results.  In 1997, Washington’s Arena Stage presented Ibsen’s Ghosts, directed and designed by Romanian avant-gardist Liviu Ciulei.  The director turned one of Ibsen’s prototypical realist plays into a symbolist production to disastrous consequences: nothing fit and all of Ciulei’s adaptations reeked of imposition.  

Arena later produced a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire staged by Hungarian director János Szász which appeared to have been updated to the time of the presentation (2001) and performed in tune with Artaud’s theater-of-cruelty theories rather than Williams’s lyric realism.  Again, the style and the text fought against one another.  

Making a play different isn’t the same as making it better, and if that’s what Neville-Andrews thought he was doing with Much Ado—improving the original—then I have to object.  (This kind of discussion always reminds me of something my father told me.  Dad studied German in high school and he was amused when he was assigned to read German translations of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other works of literature, to find the title page of the texts inscribed with the phrase: übersetzt und verbessert.  In English, that means “translated and improved”!)

It may be my own prejudice speaking, but I just don’t think Much Ado needs help to get across.  That 1979 Off-Off-Broadway showcase I did was set in Renaissance Italy like Shakespeare’s original, and a number of people told me then and later it had been one of the clearest and funniest productions of the classic comedy that they’d ever seen.  No help, in other words, had been needed aside from good acting and directing.   

[The discussion of this production of Much Ado About Nothing and several of the others I mentioned may have gotten a little confusing because they were all presented by the same theater company—though in different incarnations depending on when in the company’s history the production occurred.  I’m speaking, of course, of the current Shakespeare Theatre Company and its progenitors.

[If you haven’t spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., STC’s hometown, you’re probably not familiar with the troupe’s long history and the changes in name and venue that have occurred over that time.  I’ll try to straighten out the confusion by recounting a brief synopsis of STC’s evolution.

[The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington administered by the Trustees of Amherst College, opened in 1932.  It has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare and is a primary repository for rare materials on the Bard.  The library is also the site of the Elizabethan Theatre, a two-thirds-scale replica of a London Shakespearean-era theater (a composite design of multiple 17th-century playhouses). 

[Folger’s tiny Elizabethan Theatre was not originally intended for theatrical performances; it was used for concert performances and academic lectures.  In 1970, the space (later called simply the Folger Theatre) was converted into a functioning playhouse, and the Folger Theatre Group was formed.  In 1982, the name was changed to the Folger Theatre.

[In 1986, as the consequence of a financial shake-up, the FT became the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger.  FT artistic director John Neville-Andrews, who had assumed the post in 1980, was succeeded by Michael Kahn, former Acting Company artistic director and director of the acting division of Juilliard.  The newly established company presented its first production, Romeo and Juliet November 1986.

[In March 1992, the troupe moved into the newly-built, 451-seat Lansburgh Theatre (renamed the Michael R. Klein Theatre at the Lansburgh in November 2019) in the Penn Quarter, the revitalized shopping area in the city’s downtown.  (The highrise building which houses the new space, the first new theater in Washington to be built from the ground up after the Kennedy Center in 1971, was the former Landsburgh’s Department Store, a household name in the District.)

[The new theater was a couple of blocks north of the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor occupied by the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s museums.  The company changed its name again, to the Shakespeare Theatre.  (In 1991, a new and independent troupe, the Folger Theatre, was organized to perform in the library’s Elizabethan theater.)

[In 2005, the troupe took its current name, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and built the 774-seat, flexible-stage Sidney Harman Hall near the Landsburgh.  Harman Hall opened in October 2007 with repertory productions of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Edward II (see “Three Plays from the Shakespeare Theatre from the Archives: Edward II,” 26 April 2020).  Together, the two performances spaces are known as the Harman Center for the Arts.

[In June 2012, the American Theatre Wing awarded STC the Regional Theatre Tony Award.  Michael Kahn left the company following the 2018-2019 season after 33 years. and in September 2018, Simon Godwin, associate director of London’s National Theatre, was named the incoming artistic director.

[After taking up his position as artistic director in September 2019, Godwin made his directorial debut at STC in February 2020 with a production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens with a female actor in the title role.  On 8 April 2020, Godwin announced the closing of all of STC’s facilities in response the coronavirus pandemic, pursuant to the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control and the D.C. Health Department.  A few months later, the company announced that some planned productions would be offered online.  To date, plans for reopening its theaters for live, in-person performances have not been finalized.]