'Much Ado' makes little of Caribbean's colorful cool and Bard's heat
By Nelson Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 29, 2009
For the third time in 11 years, the Folger Theatre is opening its season with "Much Ado About Nothing." And so, during the long-ish current show you may reasonably wonder: Is this their cash-cow "Christmas Carol"? Is the company punch-drunk in love with the play?
The last two productions set Shakespeare's witty comedy in an Italian American neighborhood in New York City and in post-World War II England. This time the action happens here and now, as director Timothy Douglas creates a back-alley D.C. neighborhood on the eve of the Caribbean Carnival. (Italy's Messina is now a shop called Messinah's.) Pop out the island accents, mon, and cue the reggae -- shah!
Unfortunately, that pitch-it-in-a-sentence concept may stick in the mind longer than most of what actually happens onstage. Although the jaunty wordplay and sneaky eavesdropping of Shakespeare's comedy would seem ripe for lilting Caribbean cadences and carnivalesque revels, the actors don't fully take hold of Douglas's elaborate premise and make it soar.
"Much Ado," of course, features two of Shakespeare's most appealing lovers in the taunting Beatrice and flippant Benedick (who are not among the characters with island inflections here). They are sharp-witted combatants who swear they hate each other yet are plainly in love, and the play is helpless if their famous banter doesn't throw off prickly romantic sparks. Here it kind of does, for Howard W. Overshown (whose Benedick is a D.C. cop) has a cool way with his character's anti-marriage bluster, and he deflates beautifully when the joke's on him.
As Beatrice, the vibrant Rachel Leslie suffers from Douglas's goal of beefing up what he sees as the women's side of the play. (This leads to casting the wicked Don John's tricky minion Borachio as a woman, for instance, and occasionally inserting mystical all-female rituals into the action.) Leslie's Beatrice is so tough from the start that you fear she might crack the jibing Benedick with the beer bottle she's holding, rather than with the character's bottomless supply of linguistic weapons. Words are used as hammers in this portrayal, rather than as darts, so when the men describe Beatrice as "merry," you think they must be deaf.
The parallel plot about two more lovers suffering from misperception is laid on thick, but then the cruelty of this storyline is hard for modern directors to overlook. Claudio, one of Benedick's police chums, is smitten by the maiden Hero, but is too easily gulled into believing she's cheated on the eve of their wedding.
Claudio's sudden renunciation of the baffled Hero is tawdry and tremendously dramatic, yet while this thread helps pull Beatrice and Benedick together (with Leslie's passion blossoming hotly, fiercely), the melodrama lacks juice. Joel David Santner is a flat caricature of soap-opera villainy as the conniving Don John (super-tight jeans, pointy boots, goatee) and too little happens in the courtly gazes exchanged by Alexis Camins's boyish Claudio and Roxi Victorian's stately Hero.
Costume designer Helen Q. Huang creates gorgeous, colorful masks for carnival scenes, and Craig Wallace mans two turntables and a microphone as a DJ high on the stage's balcony. Technical glitches apparently compromised some of the sound design (by Wallace and Matthew M. Nielson) at Tuesday's preview performance, but enough funk, R&B and reggae came through that you could feel the high life rippling through the mean but flamboyantly dressed street of Tony Cisek's set.
But in the end this tale of gossip and mistakes is about language, and the smattering of accents turns out to be a skimpy dressing. "Much Ado" features more prose than all but one of Shakespeare's comedies, and its giddy conversational style is best rendered here by Alex Perez and Matt McNelly as Dogberry and Verges, two bumbling security guards who discover Don John's nasty scheme against Hero. The doofus detective duo of Perez and McNelly creates plenty of giggles -- much noting, as the play's punning title suggests, and much low-down entertaining ado.
