Shakespeare did many things well, but he did few things better than create comedies about how seriously humans take their silliness.
And while the Colorado Shakespeare Festival has for decades also shown how expert it is in bringing the Bard’s works to life for new generations, it, too, does nothing better than make Shakespeare’s comedies, about human silliness, seriously funny.
This season’s production of the epic “Much Ado About Nothing” was epic in its own rite, and it will shine in the memories of theater goers for a long, long time.
Director Jim Helsinger clearly has a keen love for Shakespeare’s subtle and clever bawdiness and ability to frost clever wordplay with funny sight gags. Before there were quality sitcoms, there was “Much Ado About Nothing.” Both Helsinger and a cast born to shine in this show make for a near-perfect evening in Boulder’s unique outdoor Mary Rippon Theater. If there’s a quintessentially Colorado experience, this is it.
The play is not unlike so many Shakespeare comedies, spun on tricks and deceptions, starring characters who will be taught a lesson, and filled with a bumpy road to requited love.
The play takes place at the home of wealthy Italian Governor Leonato, who lives with his pretty daughter, Hero, and niece Beatrice. He’s visited by a company of soldiers, including the victorious Aragon Prince Don Pedro, his protégé, Claudio, and Don Pedro’s unlikable and defeated brother, Don John. Claudio immediately falls in love with Hero, and the play centers on a variety of deceits and tricks bent on getting the couple together or tearing them apart.
The real play, however, focuses on Shakespeare’s favorite comedic couple: Beatrice and Lord Benedick, also part of Don Pedro’s company.
The love-hate conundrum between these two is storied. Lucy and Ricky, Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart and even Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in “Father Goose” can’t compete with the wordplay and gags that Beatrice and Benedict roll out. And it’s likely that no one in Colorado has ever captured that comedy like veterans Vanessa Morosco and Peter Simon Hilton.
Married in real life, the chemistry between the two is as good as their lines, which are the best in the show.
“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” Benedick throws at Beatrice, taking shots at her acid tongue and dislike for seemingly everything.
He later says about her, “She speaks poniards, and every word stabs: if her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there were no living near her; she would infect to the north star.”
Ouch.
In return, Beatrice regularly fires back at Benedick.
“O Lord, (Benedick) will hang upon him like a disease: he is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker…”
Beatrice knows just where to strike: “(Benedick) is the prince’s jester: a very dull fool: only his gift is in devising impossible slanders: none but libertines delight in him; and the commendation is not in his wit, but in his villainy; for he both pleases men and angers them, and then they laugh at him and beat him.”
While many top actors have been lauded for portraying this famous couple, none could have drawn the laughs like Morosco did peering above a clothesline or crawling out of a well. Likewise, Hilton’s slapstick while eavesdropping on a ladder and his feinted hurt by Beatrice were Morosco’s perfect foil.
The entire cast were as energetic and athletic as the endless wordplay and comic gags. Aurora’s Geoffrey Kent was equally regal and laughable as the prince who knows it all, and really nothing. Kent, Morosco and Hilton shined on the Mary Rippon stage last year in “Merry Wives of Windsor.” The three are great talents apart, but together they are for some reason even better than their parts. It’s hard to imagine they could ever be better than they are in this production.
Helsinger and the cast have woven a slick evening of laughs that crashes into the reality of a stunt taken too far.
The play, the lofty set, the summery lighting and easy staging of a large cast gives Colorado much ado to not miss this show.
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“Much Ado
About Nothing”Through Aug. 9
Mary Rippon Theater on the CU Boulder CampusTickets start at $10
303-492-8008
ColoradoShakes.org
Colorado Shakespeare Fest
Through Aug. 9
Alternating plays as part of the iconic 2015 Colorado Shakespeare Festival at the famous Boulder Mary Rippon Theater. ‘Ado’ rotates with Othello, King Henry V, King Henry VI, Part I and Wittenberg. Tickets are $10-$64. Call 303-492-8008 or visit ColoradoShakes.org.