Much Ado or Too Much Ado

Review of USF from a summer class.

Much Ado About Nothing has brilliant dialogue, particularly between Beatrice and Benedick, and very much deserves its label as a comedy, but this presents the danger of pushing the comedy too far, which this production did. They cranked the humor between Beatrice and Benedick up to a ridiculous extent. In moderation, it would have been funny. The ridiculous attempts at hiding made by Beatrice and Benedick were great until they were repeated and exaggerated continually. By the time Benedick started doing push-ups, they had lost me. When you create this much humor through the actions of the characters, you risk distracting the audience from the witty dialogue for which this play is renowned.
David Ivers played a very strong Benedick. Most of his pacing was amazing and he said his lines with a nice level of emotion. Kymberly Mellen was not as strong in her role as Beatrice as she was in her role as Lady Macbeth. She recovered brilliantly from her trip down the stage, but not as well from her stumble over the line about leading the apes into Hell. I liked, however, the manner in which she played the opening scene. I loved the way Robert Ramirez performed his role as Leonato. He caught the humor of the role and pulled off the strong confidence of the character quite well. I thought Don Burroughs made a fabulous Dogberry with his quirky mannerisms and facial expressions, but I felt he was far too emotional with his tears over being called an ass. I thoroughly enjoyed Ryan Imhoff’s portrayal of Don John. While the leather and greasy hair were a bit much, his demeanor and line delivery fit the character’s personality.
Janet L. Swenson did a lovely job with the wedding dresses for the play and the other costumes were quite good considering they were pulled and not made specifically for this production. The one exception I would add to this is the costumes for the watch. They were ridiculously mismatched to the rest of the play and while a little contrast can be good, I felt that this went too far. Aside from those costumes, this play seemed to demonstrate the most uniformity of time period within the costuming. Donna Ruzika’s job as lighting designer was fairly simple for this piece as it lacked the intensity of Macbeth. She did an excellent job of using the light to focus our attention where it was desired in this piece. Troy Hemmerling’s design of the set was unique and all of the props were useful onstage even if they had the potential to be frivolous. I liked the primarily simple sound design that Lindsay Jones chose. Strong music would have made the play overwhelming. The light quality of Balthasar’s song was a perfect addition of sound to those scenes.
The adaptations of the script for this production were interesting. The dance that they added at the beginning was a fun and exuberant way to begin and Kirsten Sham’s choreography for it was fantastic, but I did not like the little swordfight between Benedick and Claudio when they first arrived at Leonato’s house The vision of this piece was fascinating in several ways. I had not pictured Hero as the giggling and crushing young girl that she appeared to be in this production, but it worked and I liked that they had her breathless just holding Claudio’s hand. I did not like how flirtatious Beatrice was in her lines with Don Pedro that commence with “I would rather have one of your father’s getting.” She is a bold woman, but I do not see her as that outspoken or inclined to lead a man on if she was not interested and it resulted in a very awkward moment onstage. The choice to not have Margaret appear onstage after the fiasco of the first wedding scene was intriguing. It appeared to play up the idea that Margaret was unsure of what to do and thus hung back as much as possible. The decision to make Seacole blind was neither funny nor appropriate. It made the scenes with the watch absurd since Seacole was the one who could read and write. The humor of the script was strong enough without adding to it and poking fun at a disability is dangerous territory even if you can act it out well in the piece. The technical aspects of the production were very smooth. The transitions between scenes that involved set changes were smooth and Dogberry’s quick change into the nightgown was amazing. This production had a strong vision and followed it well. They made many decisions that worked and a few that did not, but it was well worth seeing.