Much Ado About Nothing
1973: Nick Havinga (Joseph Papp)

This version, available through the Broadway Theatre Archive, is an interesting piece of history. It's a competently produced version of Much Ado About Nothing, as far as it goes. It's just not to my taste very interesting as a representation of the play itself. It is, moreover, cut somewhat, so that it leaves a great many pieces of the picture unfilled.

The setting is (as was especially common in the 1970s, and still is today) transposed to another unconnected place and time. It's clearly the turn of the twentieth century (roughly) somewhere — it may be in the South. The music is jazz, women are in capacious white dresses, and the men are wearing straw hats and smoking cigars almost non-stop. Some of them (Don Pedro and Don John) are in military uniforms from the period. The point of the transposition eludes me: it doesn't really provide any sense of the universality of the play, nor does it shed any light on fin-de-siecle culture.

The typically most interesting duo in the play are of course Beatrice and Benedick: they're played by Kathleen Widdoes and Sam Waterston, respectively. Their chemistry is not particularly exciting, and I found Widdoes' delivery in some of the more potentially explosive scenes unconvincing (admittedly, “I would eat his heart in the marketplace” is not the easiest line to deliver credibly). Waterston walks through his role with a certain swagger but not much depth.

Altogether I'd recommend this as a view into the diversity and range of options that can be read into Shakespeare, but not a lot else.

Buy Much Ado About Nothing from Amazon.