[In the following review of director Daniela Varon's 2003 Shakespeare and Company staging of Much Ado about Nothing at the Founders' Theater in Lenox, Massachusetts, Rozett praises Varon's fine realization of the play's festive qualities and comic virtuosity.]

Seldom does a Shakespeare play with a modern setting manage to evoke a particular time and place as thoroughly as Shakespeare and Company's production of Much Ado about Nothing. Daniela Varon's Messina, inspired by popular images of Sicily in the 1950s, is steeped in the culture of violence and family loyalty associated with the Mafia. The oft-repeated word “honor” becomes a keynote in this production, for as Varon says in her director's notes, she is interested in “what it is to speak and to act honorably, what it really is to be a man of honor, what honor truly means to a woman in a society that equates her honor with her chastity and that makes sexual dishonor a fate worse than death.” But Varon's Sicily is also splendidly festive, its atmosphere conveyed less by the simple set than by the veritable anthology of popular instrumental and vocal music in English and Italian that starts before the play begins and continues during the intermission and straight through to the play's end. A big old-fashioned radio is the production's most important prop, and live music is performed by Balthasar, a Sinatra-like popular singer who croons “Stranger in the Night” (in both English and Italian) into a microphone to the delight of the young women in the masked-ball scene. The line “Speak low if you speak love” inspires the lyrics for another of Balthazar's songs, and there is much dancing, some of it quite comical.

The Mafia motif means that the men, who are much given to hugging and kissing on both cheeks, wear two- or three-piece suits, narrow ties, and slicked-back hair. Don Pedro and his company arrive in Messina sporting fedora hats and toting rifles, which reappear later in the play when Benedick challenges Claudio to a duel. Don John is distinguished from the rest by a tough-guy accent, a black-and-white striped shirt and white tie, and a cigarette. Antonio, often played as a doddering old man, in this production has the look of an aging prizefighter, now relegated to watering the flowers but ready to rise to the occasion and present a formidable challenge to the slightly-built Claudio in 5.1. Switchblade knives make frequent appearances: Borachio uses one to spear an olive in his martini while Leonato, in a highly charged moment, brandishes a knife at Hero in 4.1 during his long, self-absorbed speech about how his honor has been besmirched.

Hero, Beatrice, and Margaret, whose costumes change in nearly every scene, generally wear 1950s-era wide circular skirts and little bolero jackets in bright colors, and in the final scene their veils are attached to big Sunday hats (Ursula, in contrast, is an old Italian lady dressed in black). The costumes and hairdos suggest a time when, in Varon's words, “Italian women were on the one hand newly enfranchised, on the other still domestically oppressed (not unlike their American counterparts).” Paula Langton's Beatrice, with her short curly hair and forthright manner, is the most enfranchised of the three; while the other women are clustered together in the background, she is playing chess with Leonato when the soldier enters to announce Don Pedro's arrival. All Beatrices are witty and self-assured—how could they be otherwise?—but this one can be especially fearless. Her comic riff, delivered in a Marlon Brando-as-Godfather voice, on the devil who guards the gates of hell (2.1.42ff) is a hilarious spoof of the Sicilian men's posturing. Later in this scene she is a little teary-eyed when Hero and Claudio pledge themselves to one another, which may account for her lapse of discretion. When Don Pedro gets down on one knee and says seriously, “Will you have me, lady?” the atmosphere becomes tense, for Beatrice has risked insulting the honor of this formidable and powerful man. His line “Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you […]” sounds almost angry; thus the plot to play matchmakers comes across as a face-saving measure to break the tension of the moment.

As Benedick, Allyn Burrows is a splendid match for Langton's Beatrice. He uses the deep thrust stage (newly reconfigured for this season in Shakespeare and Company's Founders' Theater) to great effect, darting from one corner to another and making eye contact with various women in the audience in 2.3 to illustrate the catalogue of women (“One woman is fair, yet I am well […]”). His signature prop is a short, rush-seated stool that serves as the bull's horns in 1.1. To spy on Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato, he takes his stool and newspaper into the seating area, falls off the stool a couple of times, then climbs along the scaffolding that supports the upper level, all the while adlibbing to the audience and muttering to himself (“Contemptible? I'll show you contemptible!”). In his light-colored baggy clothing (the only point in the entire play when any of the men appear informally attired) Benedick looks boyish and vulnerable, and his delight as he dances off-stage with a potted plant at the end of 2.3 or washes his feet and shaves in the onstage fountain in 3.2 seems like a momentary respite from the honor-bound masculinity that Sicilian society demands.

Every director of Much Ado has to decide what to do about Margaret, the unwitting agent of Hero's disgrace. This production's saucy Margaret is frequently onstage, moving set furnishings, dancing to the radio music, filling in for the boy Benedick sends for a book in 2.3, and enjoying the gulling of Beatrice from the side balcony overlooking the stage. Her romance with the masterful Borachio is established during the masked ball in anticipation of a mostly silent nighttime scene that Varon adds between 3.2 and 3.3. Margaret and Hero appear in a window, and Hero takes off her sequined jacket and hands it to Margaret, who puts it on as Hero leaves. Margaret then lets down a rope ladder for Borachio, and we watch, with Claudio, Don John, and Don Pedro, as the couple embraces. When Borachio calls her “Hero,” Claudio lets out an anguished howl, and the scene ends. As in most productions of Much Ado, Margaret is present in the wedding scene. After Don Pedro describes what he saw (“Myself, my brother, and this grieved count / Did see her hear her, at that hour last night […]”), Margaret recognizes her complicity and rushes horror-stricken from the stage. There is much weeping among these emotional Italians (at various points in the evening Hero, Beatrice, Benedick, and Claudio are reduced to tears), so it is quite in character for Margaret to be weeping copiously at her next entrance in 5.2. But she soon cheers up and engages in witty banter with the verse-challenged Benedick, an about-turn that, if not entirely convincing, is in keeping with the play's emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation.

This Much Ado has no shortage of comic business: Beatrice gets tangled up in a corset and clothes-pinned to the wash line as she hides from Hero and Ursula, and the Dogberry scenes are played to the hilt by a slapstick ensemble led by veteran Shakespeare and Company actor Jonathan Epstein. Epstein's Dogberry is dressed in full military regalia with a feathered Napoleon hat and an umbrella. He mops his brow continuously with numerous colored handkerchifs, as if exhausted by the effort to make himself understood. He and Verges enter speaking Italian, and only after the latter, gesturing to the audience, says “No capice Italiano,” do they switch to English, with occasional lapses. There is much comic horseplay involving cappuccino cups and the props carried by the three Watchmen, a baker, a fisherman, and a miner. I'll pass over without comment the frequent use of round trapdoors through which the actors pop up and down like gophers, echoing last summer's Henry V. Suffice to say that the comic scenes are a little longer and sillier than they need to be but that Epstein's Dogberry, like his Bottom a few seasons ago, is at once wonderfully dignified and utterly absurd. When Borachio confesses in 5.1, the audience senses that Dogberry still doesn't quite get it. The most important aspect of the incident, as far as he's concerned, is that Conrad called him an ass, and his air of injured dignity is both comic and sobering in a society where insult and slander are rife. Like so many of the play's characters, his honor has been grievously wounded, and his exit after passing the ceremonial hat and umbrella of office to one of the Watchmen is tinged with melancholy.

Much Ado is one of several Shakespearean comedies that end with music and dancing, and in this production the music and dancing have been so much a part of the action that it seems altogether natural for the accordions to crank out a lively two-step that becomes a delightfully witty series of curtain calls. There is a dark moment, of course, when the soldier arrives to say that Don John has been taken in flight and brought back to Messina. He presents Don Pedro with a package containing the black-and-white striped shirt and three dead fish, presumably a Mafioso sign that the bad guy is no more. Nevertheless, in the curtain-call dance Don John, a fish strung around his neck, steps nimbly with his fellow actors, and the evening ends on a decidedly festive note.