My heart beats in iambic pentameter

On Sunday I went to see Much Ado About Nothing at the Trinity Shakespeare festival. Much Ado is one of my favorites from Shakespeare. It really is a pull out all the stops show: take a bit of Romeo and Juliet, add a dash of Othello, a touch of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, a shake of Twelfth Night and a good size dollop of Taming of the Shrew and you have Much Ado. The show with everything (but Yul Brynner). Not that I would run to see any production. That’s a lot of dashes and shakes, and it frequently ends up a hash, rather than the tangy confection it should be. But this got a really good review, and last year’s Twelfth Night over at Trinity was quite fun. So we made the slog to Fort Worth.

So worth it. There’s a moment with live theater, when it’s really good, where you have a moment of heartbreak – this is so good, and I will never see it quite like this again. The good kind of sad, that makes your eyes cling to every moment. And my hear cracked in two during Beatrice and Benedick’s first verbal sparring match. She was quite perfect – smarter than she is pretty, but still quite pretty. Beatrice should be poised on the point of a social knife – smart enough to realize that if she was less smart she’d be more socially acceptable. And she should be a little pissed off about it. Benedick was less cast to type. He looked less like the happy playboy bee more than happy to pollinate any accommodating flower than like the happy soccer dad more than happy to run to the Home Depot for a bucket of primer. But. He starts talking and all that falls away, and damned if he was a very romantic leading man. He’s that good.

There wasn’t anyone in the cast who wouldn’t have been welcome in any Shakespeare production. They all actually were able to say the lines like they were just people talking, not translating from another language. The funny bits were really funny. The sad bits were really sad. And if I’d had popcorn, I’d have thrown it at the villain. What a Nasty McBaddy!

The sets was a delicious Italian villa. The costumes were all from the same early Regency period (it makes me frantic when they try to fob off costumes that are half Renaissance and half Medieval, or half Regency, a quarter Victorian and a quarter early Barbara Cartland novel cover – some people in the audience will know the difference, thank you). It was all quite lovely. And I’ll never see it again. Sigh.