10 September 2006: Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing
10 September 2006: Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing
Matinee. Hampshire Shakespeare Company. Directed by Sheila Siragusa. After-season benefit for the University of Massachusetts Renaissance Center. On the lawn behind the Center.
I missed seeing this production during its regular run this past summer; so it was a treat to be able to see it — with some minor changes in cast, ten in all, according to Sheila Siragusa, a former UMass Theatre Department student who studied with me on her way to her MFA in directing.
She really brought the play to life. The updated setting is Messina after the victory of the Allies ending World War II. The music is that wonderful combination of the romantic and the zany that characterizes Glen Miller and the Andrews Sisters and others, that now exists in one of the most perspicuous time warps of any in American history (sixty years ago). I knew all those songs, being nine going on ten in those days when the war came to an end, and finding I could play them all by ear on my new clarinet, just like Benny Goodman (I thought).
Siragusa captures a nice nostalgic feeling that lends a definite charm to this production. These are amateur actors, and the level of expertness varied; and yet the pace and focus of the action remained remarkably constant. Any production of Much Ado must stand or fall on the capacities of the actor and actress playing Benedick and Beatrice. In this case, Kathryn Lynch and Steve Angel were fully up to the challenge. (I had almost used the names of the young cast of the play, part of the Hampshire Shakespeare approach to initiate young actors into performing Shakespeare.) Lynch is a beautiful, statuesque blonde with full lips and wonderful carriage, who was clothed, winningly, in hip-hugging slacks (very adventurous, in 1945) and pastel-colored tulip skirts that simultaneously stayed with her and flounced provocatively as she walked. All that would have been for nothing, however, without that lovely combination of hauteur and underlying vulnerability that makes Beatrice what she is. Lynch captured that paradoxical quality very nicely, and even invested it with a certain pathos. At least, I sensed that in her admission to Don Pedro, who says he believes she was “born in a merry hour”:
Beatrice: No, sure, my Lord, my mother cried: but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born.
The pains of childbirth are part of Beatrice’s sense of herself, along with a dancing star; and we can speculate that fears of the trauma of childbirth lie in some measure behind the extraordinary self-protective barrier of ostensible man-hating that seems to characterize Beatrice’s encounters with any man who might find himself falling in love with her.
Chris Junno was an appropriate foil for all this, capturing the single-mindedness and charming, naïve egotism that give the Benedick his comic manliness and, finally, courage in the service of humankind. “The world must be peopled!” is his characterizing cry.
As Si