Summary 
Modernized to 1920s Messina, this elegant production is enhanced by a live nine-piece orchestra and on-stage musicians. A mature Benedick and Beatrice are languishing and wise but revitalized by romance. Bolstered by uniformly strong supporting performances.
Design
Directed by Richard Monette. Set by Guido Tondino. Costumes by Ann Curtis. Lights by Michael Whitfield. Original music by Berthold Carriere. Sound by Jim Neil. Fights by James Binkley. Choreography by Valerie Moore.
Cast
William Hutt (Leonato), Jennifer Gould (Hero), Martha Henry (Beatrice), Joseph Shaw (Antonio), James Blendick (Don Pedro), Tom McCamus (Don John), Brian Bedford (Benedick), Tim MacDonald (Claudio), Jeffrey Renn (Borachio), Stephen Ouimette (Dogberry), Brian Tree (Verges).
Analysis
The Stratford Festival's artistic director, Richard Monette, directs a Broadway-bound Much Ado About Nothing that is modernized to the 1920s, although the action remains within the heat of Messina, Italy. The elegantly designed production features choreographed set changes by dutiful servants and begins within a mottled tan sitting room with shining black trim. Wicker chairs, parasols, and throw pillows adorn the stage, which changes with drop-down arches and a series of wrought iron gates, fences, and railings.
The set features a three-dimensional view overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, with roving spotlights upon the shimmering "water," as well as distant mountains and starlit skies. The blue-lit 4.1 wedding is staged before a towering crucifix backdrop, and the subsequent 5.1 challenges are made before an ornate, if obtrusively large, tan and brown fountain.
The original musical score incorporates "Ave Maria" during the wedding scene, and earlier, an adaptation of "Sigh No More" that Balthasar croons directly to the quasi-concealed Benedick. The song begins with a lone guitarist upstage who is then joined by an upright-bass player and eventually by a nine-piece orchestra. Most strikingly, the "fear no more the heat of the sun" lyrics from 4.2 of The Tale of Cymbeline are set to music. The song is briefly reprised to conclude the first-half deception of Claudio with the "come to dust" refrain hauntingly sung as the lights fade out.
Stratford favorite Brian Bedford portrays the sensible Benedick to lead a mature cast. Bedford's maturity - as well as Martha Henry's as Beatrice - empowers the production with a wiseness and a sense of opportunity for renewal that would have been missed with younger and/or less experienced performers. For example, a long-haired and bearded Bedford begins with the usual puffing against the turn-husband Claudio, but when he conceals himself behind a colorful fruit tree - clad in an orange shirt and a red tie - to overhear his friends, he is figuratively ripe for picking. His initial response to Beatrice's purported love is a simple, unwilling trembling that nearly shakes the newspaper from his hands. His subsequent soliloquies are spoken directly to the audience, and his glee at the fortunes of love is obvious: he can barely whisper his third "but I am well" at 2.3. After Beatrice calls him to dinner - brandishing an open book in one hand and a butcher's knife in the other - he can merely point after her and smile broadly to the audience.
Henry's "my lady tongue" Beatrice exhibits a similar maturity that also gives way to renewed vivacity, and she begins the play languishing on a chaise lounge. She wears a floppy sun hat and dark glasses. Henry portrays Beatrice as appealingly intelligent, but most importantly, as witty but not sarcastic, and as wry but not bitter, as she shows when she helps the lovelorn Hero dress for the masque, or later, when she hip-bumps her cousin into a first kiss with the youthfully speechless Claudio. While Ursula and Hero - strolling the gardens with parasols - discuss Benedick's supposed love, the suddenly spry Henry darts about the hedges truly "like a lapwing," her matronly sweater pulled over her head. Afterward, Beatrice stands weak-kneed and inflamed - both physically and emotionally - and after she removes hat, shawl and glasses, she must "air out" first her blouse, then her skirt. She sneezes, as do the bemused set-changers immediately after, and as predicted, she and Benedick soon begin to "talk themselves mad."
Superb supporting players bolster Bedford and Henry. Amid the gaiety, the evil Don John is truly "a canker in a hedge." In contrast to the other players, he wears a long black leather coat over his black clothes, and he limps along with the aid of a black cane that conceals a sword. He combs his dark, slicked hair straight back, and he wears a pencil-thin black mustache and dark sunglasses. His appearance would render him a humorously stereotypical villain, except for a multi-layered, seemingly fated - and resigned - performance. Don John mystifies, a surprisingly rich character that inspires thought at the origin of his wickedness rather than serving a one-dimensional purpose. Unfortunately, the character makes no appearance after the 4.1 wedding debacle.
Don John's compatriots - a long-haired and open-shirted Borachio, and a headband-wearing Conrade - are also clad in black, but the two villains lack the world-weariness of Don John, just as Claudio and Hero lack the maturity of Beatrice and Benedick. Pointedly, Borachio and Conrade seem like they have the potential to become Don John-like in their maturity. In an example of Don John's mastery, at one point he plucks a cigar from Borachio's lips, wipes it clean upon his own white scarf, and proceeds to smoke it himself in a casual display of conscienceless self-absorption.
Another Stratford favorite, William Hutt, clad in a red-vested tuxedo and always sipping brandy or a martini, plays a dapper and sophisticated Leonato. Hutt plumbs similar depths of character as other members of Monette's mature cast. Rather than side with his compatriots against his daughter, as he seems prone to do, he instead kneels before Hero and looks deeply into her eyes as if he is seeking the truth. When Hutt finds it, his head bows with a silent, fatherly plea for forgiveness, and he rises with more vigor than which he knelt, and he then helps Hero to stand as well.
Earlier, Leonato's participation in the trickery of Benedick includes a slew of martini refills, and Hutt's Leonato quickly becomes incapable of coherent thought - with a drunken refrain of "my daughter says so" - then speech - in a series of Foster Brooks-style vocal slips and slurs - and finally the ability to even move: "my lord, will you walk? becomes "my lord, can you walk?"
Dogberry and Verges provide stout comic relief, beginning their scenes immediately after interval with the appearance of the watch. They set a lighthearted slapstick tone immediately, as Dogberry treads gracelessly upon the bushy white tail of a sleeping alley cat and then watches as the "cat" races offstage with a high-pitched squeal and impossible speed. Then, blowing his omnipresent whistle, he motions for the bumbling Verges to position a tiny stool onstage for him to mount and speak from. Wearing a horrendous black toupee that threatens to flip forward during his bows, heel-clicks and assorted pratfalls, Dogberry proceeds to massacre the language while frequently descending into physical slapstick with his partner. His refusal to relinquish his policeman's helmet to Leonato's housemaid accelerates into a fevered tug-of-war, and when he and Verges attempt to pat each other clean of dust, they quickly fall into rude and childish slap attacks. Next, their willingness to enjoy a jug of Leonato's wine collapses into a frantic roughhouse that is a blur of shouts, twists, and flailing limbs.
The ancient Verges is a comically physical calamity: bow-headed and bespectacled with long gray hair, he arrives with the sexton upon a two-seated bicycle, and he speaks in a guttural gargle of barely intelligible noises.
Claudio's repentance is portrayed amid torches, robes, and chants, as the young man prays before a wreath for his "lost" Hero. His willingness to wed an unseen "cousin" is dramatized with eight white-shrouded potential wives whirling and dancing around him. The shrouded women are eerily reflected in the stage's candelabra-illuminated mirrors. Claudio's sincerity and his reunion with Hero begin the happy finale, as even the bickering Benedick and Beatrice are united by their sonnets - undone "by their own hands" - although they both must don reading glasses to examine the other's poetry. After a final, elegant dance, the two begin to argue over the other's writing as the lights fade and the production concludes.
At the curtain calls, Dogberry's formal bow results in the horrid toupe flipping over to conceal his face, and amid robust applause - and in the spirit of the play - Bedford and Henry walk hand in hand to downstage center. As Benedick and Beatrice, they then stroll back upstage and, of course, disagree over which direction to exit.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.17, No.2, Spring 1999.