Love's Labour's Lost (Vol. 77) | John Simon (review date 19 June 2000)
John Simon (review date 19 June 2000)
SOURCE: Simon, John. Review of Love's Labour's Lost. National Review 52, no. 11 (19 June 2000): 59-60.
[In the following excerpted review, Simon finds nothing redeeming in Kenneth Branagh's cinematic Love's Labour's Lost, and critiques the individual performances of its cast.]
Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost … [is] adapted into a musical with songs (most of them standards) by Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, and Kern, sung and danced by a cast of mostly nonsingers and nondancers. The play's minor characters, forming an important subplot, are barely more than walk-ons, with Holofernes, for instance, changed and trimmed into Holofernia, giving the distinguished Geraldine McEwan a part that could have been handled by a hologram. Only Nathan Lane, as Costard, gets half a chance for, as it were, a half-life.
The action is moved to 1939 in a kingdom of Navarre oblivious to the...
[The entire page is 451 words long]
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