Much Ado about Nothing (review)

Director Marianne Galloway's first production with Shakespeare Dallas emphasized the low comedy of Much Ado about Nothing for broad laughs and maintained a brisk pace for the action. While her heavy reliance on slapstick, vulgar hand gestures and knowing looks obscured the distinction between high comedy (wit) and low (clowning) in the play, Galloway's inspired use of doubling and an interchangeable fountain/tomb device gave the production energy and valuable insight.

The ornate Italian garden setting designed by Clare Floyd DeVries, which divided the stage space into several discrete units, facilitated brisk scene changes and aided the eavesdropping scenes. The stage was partitioned into a downstage area with a fountain, with stairs on each side of the fountain leading to a bridge, under which DeVries had created a luminous water effect, and an upstage area delineated by a wall of arched hedges. The cast made optimal use of these multiple stage spaces, which allowed for quick entries and exits, performing both on the stage and in the aisles of the outdoor amphitheatre. While the garden with its classical statuary was a conventional choice for setting— reminiscent of Branagh's 1993 film set—Galloway made creative and often comic use of the set's hedged archways—perfect for Beatrice to peep over as her gossips, Hero, Margaret and Ursala, revealed Benedict's secret love. The centerpiece of the set, a reversible fountain/tomb device, linked the play's wooing, marriage, mourning, and reconciliation scenes in a single visual symbol, foregrounding the interwoven themes of love, loss, and recovery and the play's oscillations between frivolity and gravity. The "merry war" of the play is, after all, a paradox of harmony and contention. The site of love becomes the site of Hero's rejection and shame, and the site of mourning and lament becomes one of recovery and marital celebration.

Roaring on Vespas through the amphitheatre audience and onto stage, Don Pedro and his men, dressed in fatigues, were welcomed back from war with an exaggerated jubilance that set the tone for much of the production. Galloway created an eminently enjoyable artifice through broad humor and physical acting that energized the play, only sparingly allowing Much Ado's darker, brutal undertones to surface. Setting the action in contemporary Messina, Judy Wenzel attired the cast mainly in beige and white contemporary dress, except in the masquerade scene of 2.1, in which the characters donned Venetian masks and colorful Renaissance costumes. In particular, Beatrice, the only woman dressed in pants throughout the production, wore a moustache and, to underscore her masculine bravado, heartily took groin in hand on several occasions in this scene. Sumptuous and handsomely choreographed, the masquerade scene was rife with sexuality.

The physicality of the acting style in this production suited Jack Birdwell, Benedick, whose oversized gestures and broad, quick wit made him quite appealing. He played Benedick as roguishly charming, a bachelor in words more than sentiment, so that, during his monologue in 2.3, we watched with sympathy and knowing as he persuaded himself, easily, into love. Elise Reynard, his Beatrice, imbued her character with intelligence and force, commanding the stage space and briskly yet lucidly, delivering her tongue-twisting rebukes of Benedick. Vulgar hand gestures sometimes made her delivery a little less charming though and, as with the production as a whole, perhaps Reynard could have done more with a subtle wink or wry smile. As a couple, they were a dynamic, vigorous pair, whose interactions hinted at the smarting wounds...