Personal Note: A Merry Hour
May. 9th, 2008 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadweLast night I went with my goddaughter and her mother to see a fourth-grade production of Much Ado About Nothing. Fourth-grade, in case you were wondering, refers to the age of the cast, not the quality of the production -- which was first rate. The play was adapted to run in about fifty minutes, but retained many of the original's best lines (e.g. "I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me!" delivered with sitcom disdain by ten-year-old Beatrice to a bespectacled Benedick). The plot came through intact -- only Dogberry, sadly, was reduced from a comic character to a plot function as the arresting officer. A narrator contextualized each scene, which helped the younger members of the audience follow the contortions of the plot -- though my poor goddaughter, a third-grader, had a dickens of a time keeping the cast straight. After all, the guy everyone calls "the Prince" is not the dashing (if credulous) young hero or the guy with all the good lines, but a round-faced gent in camouflage (it was a modern-dress production :-) who, as he relaxed, took every chance he got to mug. I think we had her sorted by the time we put her to bed.
The lovey-dovey bits (no kissing, but much exchanging of a bouquet of fake flowers) were clearly less to the young actors' taste than the funny business, but that's to be expected. I did find the choice of subject slightly odd given the age of the cast: the whole "disgrace Hero by making her out to be a trollop" bit was right in there, including Don John's line "Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero." They didn't land as hard on it as the original does, however, and the scene where Claudio publicly dumps his bride was full of inadvertent comedy, from the Friar's nervous grin throughout -- it was the actor's first scene -- to Hero's trust-fall-style faint into Ursula's arms, to the entire cast corpsing when the narrator and the Friar got their lines slightly mixed, so I doubt anyone else felt the incongruity. The cast was otherwise letter-perfect with their lines and blocking and enthusiastic in their delivery; the set was simple but functional; and the gate went to cystic fibrosis research, so all in all it was a merry hour.
The lovey-dovey bits (no kissing, but much exchanging of a bouquet of fake flowers) were clearly less to the young actors' taste than the funny business, but that's to be expected. I did find the choice of subject slightly odd given the age of the cast: the whole "disgrace Hero by making her out to be a trollop" bit was right in there, including Don John's line "Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero." They didn't land as hard on it as the original does, however, and the scene where Claudio publicly dumps his bride was full of inadvertent comedy, from the Friar's nervous grin throughout -- it was the actor's first scene -- to Hero's trust-fall-style faint into Ursula's arms, to the entire cast corpsing when the narrator and the Friar got their lines slightly mixed, so I doubt anyone else felt the incongruity. The cast was otherwise letter-perfect with their lines and blocking and enthusiastic in their delivery; the set was simple but functional; and the gate went to cystic fibrosis research, so all in all it was a merry hour.