‘MUCH ADO’ OVER NEW BARD VIEW
Shakespeare goes down to Ga.
The groundbreaking director who brought Diddy to Broadway — and the words of Tupac Shakur — is now reimagining a hallowed Shakespeare classic.
Kenny Leon, who won the 2014 Tony Award for his revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” is staging the William Shakespeare comedy “Much Ado About Nothing” at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater with an all-black cast and set in a modern-day Atlanta mansion — with music and dancing.
“I didn’t cast it all-black because I wanted an allblack production,” says Leon about his audacious, contemporary take on the Bard’s 400-year-old prose. “I cast it because it came to me in terms of the play about community, and I just chose it around this specific place in Georgia. Everything about the play and all these universal messages will come through.”
For this latest production of The Public Theater’s 57year tradition of Free Shakespeare in the Park that runs May 21 through June 23, Leon enlisted “Orange is the New Black” actress Danielle Brooks to lead a cast of two dozen.
Brooks, who made her Broadway debut as Miss Sofia in “The Color Purple” in 2015, plays Beatrice and is joined by fellow Juilliard School alumni Grantham Coleman and Jeremie Harris as Benedick and Claudio, respectively. Tony Awardwinning Broadway veteran Chuck Cooper takes on the role of Leonato in Shakespeare’s tale of love and deception.
“I have 25 great actors, singers, dancers, and I think we’re doing something really special,” says Leon, who as the former artistic chief of Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre staged a version of “Much Ado” at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival about 20 years ago.
“But I didn’t know what I was doing then,” he says. “I didn’t understand the play. I didn’t understand Shakespeare. I was doing bad Shakespeare just like everybody else.” Moving the story into the present also meant Leon “wanted to be sensitive in terms of the gender stuff ” because Shakespeare in the #MeToo era can be a challenge, he says.
“When he wrote that play, he was writing a lot about men’s ideas of women, chauvinistic behavior toward our women. So when I started working on it, I was like, ‘Okay, I can flip some of these roles and make a bigger statement about the way women are treated in our country,” he adds. “So the first thing I did was set the play in America but not changing any of Shakespeare’s words. And the second thing I did was add more contemporary music from our tradition.”
Despite the contemporary touches, Shakespeare’s original text will remain the same — but with a message for our times.
“I think it will speak to our hearts now in terms of what we’re going through in America,” Leon says. “How we’re living, how we’re treating each other, how we’re respecting each other and disrespecting each other.”