Optimist’s free ‘Much Ado’ leans hard on gags
Now in its eighth year of offering free Shakespeare to Milwaukee, Optimist Theatre’s worthy goal is to provide “people’s Shakespeare,” rightly driving home that the world’s best writer belongs to everyone.
But at Friday night’s opening performance of Optimist’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” the conversations I overheard during intermission suggested confusion and frustration. Audience members were struggling with the verse. They couldn’t keep the characters straight. At night’s end, their applause would be polite but tepid.
The fault, dear readers, was not with either the people or the Bard.
Once again this year, the problem involves Optimist itself, mounting another poorly directed and lackluster production in which a great Shakespeare play is declaimed rather than inhabited and played for gags rather than its moving portrait of how and why we’re so afraid to express what we feel.
Director Tom Reed has set this “Much Ado” in a tropical world – half Margaritaville and half “Smuggler’s Island” – with nondescript costuming giving no clue that this site’s governor (David Flores as Leonato) is hosting a company of soldiers (led by Michael Stebbins as Don Pedro).
Reed presumably intends to suggest the becalmed backwater world in which most of these emotionally stuck characters initially find themselves: whether as islanders or as soldiers, they’d rather jest and jive than own what they feel.
But feel they do, and any decent “Much Ado” must tap the roiling waters bubbling beneath every witty and barbed exchange between once and future lovers Beatrice (Kelley Faulkner) and Benedick (Todd Denning). Not so, here. Faulkner’s brittle performance gives us little hint of the hurt and fear at the edge of Beatrice’s ostensibly sun-dappled personality. Denning is too busy clowning to channel the combination of wry self-knowledge and insecurity in Benedick.
There’s also little chemistry between these two; Reed would rather trawl for laughs, as he does in his ham-handed staging of this play’s great gulling scenes. Here, it’s all about busy and overdone physical comedy; we miss the great spiritual awakening that simultaneously unfolds. It’s tedious rather than fun.
In the subplot featuring lovers Claudio and Hero, Candace Thomas and Di’Monte Henning fare no better. Thomas goes from overly demure to angrily self-possessed, overnight; neither is right. Henning gives no hint of the hurt that Claudio feels as jealousy consumes him; slandering Hero at their wedding, he presents as a cold cad rather than as the wounded, immature boy he is.
Beyond this central quartet, there are fine performances from Flores as the conflicted Leonato; James Pickering, reprising his star turn in American Players Theatre's “Much Ado” of 2014 as a bumbling constable; Kat Wodtke as a lady in waiting; and both Jonathan Wainwright and Emmitt Morgans, as the villainous Don John and sidekick Borachio.
The saturnine Don John wonders why everyone on stage is yucking it up; I’ve never so fully understood how he feels. There’s much ado on stage in this production. But most of it is sound and flurry, signifying nothing.
Optimist Theatre’s production of “Much Ado About Nothing” runs on weekends through July 22 at the Marcus Center's outdoor Peck Pavilion, with all performances at 8 p.m. except a noon matinee on July 18. Admission is free. For information, visit www.optimisttheatre.org.