Review : Shakespeare At Play’s “Romeo and Juliet”

October 31, 2013December 11, 2023 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

By very strange coincidence I received two independent requests for review recently for almost the exact same thing – interactive Shakespeare for my iPad. Here’s the thing, though – one is an interactive book, and one is an app. Other than this technicality they are nearly identical both in function as well as what they hope to accomplish. As such I cannot help but review them against each other. Here we look at the app.

Read the plays or see them performed?

It’s a question we’ve beaten into the ground over the years and my position has always been that it’s the “or” that causes trouble. You absolutely positively without doubt should do one and the other. The constraints of daily life are what decide which you have the better opportunity to accomplish.

Every time I have a new project I think to myself, book or app? The traditional book format reaches a wider audience with simpler requirements, but you sacrifice your ability to really dig in and create a truly interactive experience. An app is a more complex beast, taking longer to produce for what is ultimately a smaller audience, but you get to make it do exactly what you envisioned.

Today we have the Shakespeare At Play app for review. Much like other offerings in this space, this product walks you through Shakespeare’s work by providing half a page of text and half a page of video. Each scene gets an audio description, a textual description, and a textual description of the characters.

Before getting into the quality of the content, I want to mention a few other features. Under the global Menu option is a Shakespeare FAQ, whose purpose I did not truly understand. It’s just a text file, not even searchable. There is an integrated glossary, which is a nice touch. As you read you’ll see some words in boldface. Hold your finger on one, and you’ll get the definiton.

There is also a Download Manager. In my previous post I mentioned that without internet connectivity I was unable to stream the videos, thus giving a point to the more traditional book format. However, you can opt to download all the videos and take them with you. The thing is you need to plan to do that ahead of time, it’s still not going to work if your internet goes out :).

This is also a player app for multiple titles, and as such it has its own Library (unlike iBooks, where going to Library takes you out of each individual title). As of this moment I think that their Library functionality needs work, it took me ages to figure out that I’m supposed to click on the unadorned price box under each title in order to complete the in-app purchase and actually get my book.

Lastly, what I think is perhaps the most useful feature of the entire app. Running alongside the text is not what I’d call modern translation, but more like “director’s notes” telling you what’s going on, and why. An example:

Presumably Gregory sees Tybalt approaches, which is confusing as it is Benvolio who arrives first. This could mean that Tybalt is seen by Samson and Gregory, but is positioned so as to surprise Benvolio.

This commentary runs throughout the play, and I thought it was an excellent addition.

Ok, with features out of the way let’s talk about the content. In this particular case I’ve chosen Romeo and Juliet, since I did Macbeth in a previous review. The company’s Hamlet is listed as “Coming Soon”.

Similar to the previous title I reviewed, each scene is a bare stage (that in this case blends almost completely into the page), tightly focused on the speaking characters. This puts an unfortunate focus on the quality of the acting, which is far from award winning. It’s more like people just got in front of the character with the intent of demonstrating how the lines should go. But that’s fine, it’s not like Sir Ian and Sir Patrick are just hanging out waiting for their phone call. The value of these apps is in their interactivity, not their stagecraft. I don’t mean to fault the enthusiasm of the actors who made this, I just don’t think that this nothing-but-character-closeups method of filming is the best way to present Shakespeare.

Each video represents an entire scene, which you follow along by vertically scrolling the text in a separate frame. I would love it if these could be synced up in some way. If you let the video run for a few minutes and then actually have a question, it’s going to take you awhile to find that spot in the text. Similarly if you’re reading ahead and want to jump the video to a certain place, you’ll have equal trouble.

I’m at a complete loss as to what I’m supposed to do when I get to the end of a scene. There’s no obvious way to move to the next one. The unobvious way is to tap the current Act and Scene button at the top of the page, which brings down a menu and allows you to pick another scene. I find this so unintuitive that I assume I’m just missing something. Sure, it allows you to easily jump around the play. But aren’t most reader/watchers going to most often want to simply say “next scene”?

What else…. the audio commentary I suppose is a nice idea, but the interface needs work. Unlike the video player which has the traditional pause buttons and progress bars, the audio offers none of that, just a play button. Every time you stop and start, it starts over. Which I’d be fine with except for the fact that there’s no way to tell how long he’s going to talk! Is this a 45 second commentary or a 12 minute one? That makes a big difference.

I’d like to see many more features to bring an app like this on par with a book. Highlighting passages and taking notes would be a big one. That seems like an easy add. As I mentioned I’d like the video and text to stay in sync, even going so far as to seamlessly jump between scenes so you could if you wanted just watch the whole book end to end.

Right now I think that the “director’s commentary” I spoke of is the best part of this app. Perhaps they could marry this together with the video syncing and the audio commentary to produce something more like a modern DVD? Where the user could opt to turn on the commentary track and then following through the play in text and video, while listening to the director’s notes? That would be seriously cool.

Shakespeare at Play comes in both iPhone and iPad editions. The app itself is free, but in-app purchase is required for the plays you wish to study.

Review : Read and Watch Macbeth

October 31, 2013October 4, 2018 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always been a big proponent of using technology to fix this gap, and Apple’s new “interactive books” make some important steps in the right direction. Unfortunately I think there’s still a long way to go before they can compete with dedicated apps.

New Book Press graciously sent me a copy of their WordPlay Macbeth for review. Keep in mind that this is a book, not an app, and you’ll find it in the Books section of the iTunes Store.

What goes into an interactive book? Well, start with the original text, that’s obvious. There’s a summary page for each scene which includes clickable images of all the characters in that scene. Click one and you get a summary of that character’s role as well.

But this is only half the page! The opposite page is filled up with a movie so you can follow along the text while the actors perform for you. This is actually pretty cool. Now you truly can read and watch and the same time!

There’s more. You watch the actors perform it. You can see the text as they do it. What if you still have no idea what they just said? Here’s something you can’t do away from your computer — hit that “Tap to translate” button and up pops an English translation of what you just saw/read.

Like any book you can also bookmark your place, and search the text. You can also take notes as you go, highlighting passages and adding your own thoughts. The website mentions “social sharing” functions, but all I found was the ability to email your own notes.

This is a great deal of functionality for a book, and it should be viewed as such. I don’t want to take away from that. I do, however, feel that there are a number of things that they may want to change, if the format allows it:

The “Tap to Translate” button brings up the modern copy as a balloon style dialogue box, half atop the text and half over the video (which might still be playing). That means there’s no real “side by side” comparison to what you’re reading. You can’t move it. The video also doesn’t switch over, which I understand (that would double the already huge filesize), but it would be cool if you clicked that button and then got to watch the actors perform it in modern language.
Every page is some text, and a video. That means that you get very little text per page, and very little acting (since each video only represents what’s on the page). So working your way through the book would be an exercise in “Play video, watch 30 seconds, flip…play video, watch 30 seconds, flip…” for 4 hours worth of content.
I’m not sure what they were going for with the acting, whether it’s supposed to be legit or campy or educational or what. The background of the videos is pure white, along with the book itself, so when you play a video it’s as if characters are running out of the page right at you (which is actually kind of cool). Monologues are frequently spoken directly to the reader, breaking the fourth wall, which was a little jarring to me.
They doubled up on some actors, which is no big deal in a real stage production but if this is intended to be an educational resource, you have to assume that there’s a younger audience who is actually trying to pay attention and learn something … and when the guy that was just playing the third witch a minute ago suddenly runs up to report to Duncan about Macbeth’s exploits on the battlefield, many readers will be left confused.
Each “chapter” (Act and/or Scene) comes with a summary page that contains clickable portraits of all the actors, and one or more still images of the videos to come, along with a high level summary of the chapter. I found this more confusing than anything else. I wanted to click the still images and fast forward to those sections (you cannot). The “bio” for each actor is the same no matter where they appear in the play, so once you’ve read one they just get in the way. It might have been better to use that space to actually talk about what each character is going to do in the scene?
I’m very confused by the name to look for. The web site calls these books WordPlay Shakespeare, but when you look on iTunes the book is called “Read and Watch Macbeth : Complete Text & Performance.” I don’t know if that’s because I got some sort of early review copy or what, and I apologize to the publisher if I’m calling it by the wrong name. But I also want people to be able to find it in the store!

Overall, I’ll say again, I like the idea of the “interactive book” format and think it has potential. I witnessed one advantage just this week when my internet went out. As I mentioned above I have another interactive Shakespeare app that is very similar to this one — but without internet I could not watch any of the videos :(. With this version I have everything I need downloaded, so I could take it with me places that may not have a live net connection. That’s a bonus that we often forget.

Macbeth requires iBooks 3 on an iPad device with iOS 5.1 or higher.

Guest Review : ROMEO & JULIET, Adapted by Julian Fellowes, Directed By Carlo Carlei

October 10, 2013December 11, 2023 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and founder of the website Making the Movie. You should follow him on Twitter here, Google+ here or Facebook here.

Thanks to Duane for letting me nerd out a bit more on the Shakespeare side than I would for my usual film reviews on Making the Movie.

Every generation has its cinematic Romeo and Juliet. There are some still alive who, in 1936, saw 34-year-old Norma Shearer’s Juliet embrace 43-year-old Leslie Howard’s Romeo on the big screen. It was the 1968 version, directed by Italian impresario Franco Zeffirelli, that I watched in Junior High, on one of those rolly-cart televisions, when I first studied the play. Then my generation’s entry came: the Baz Luhrmann-directed Romeo + Juliet (1996), the old text slung at great velocity into the modern, operatic setting of “Verona Beach.”

Now, for better or for worse, we have this generation’s entry: Romeo & Juliet directed by another Italian, Carlo Carlei (Daredevil, I Am Legend) and adapted by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey). If you don’t want to read spoilers — and by spoilers, I mean how it was adapted, not the story, which I will assume you know — then let me just state my opinion of the film broadly. I feel bad for this generation.

Now, the details — or shall I say, little atomies? Three lines into the film, a Shakespeare fan will notice that Fellowes and his collaborators have made a bold choice: to completely change some dialogue. I’m not talking about traditional dramaturgy, where scenes are omitted or lines moved between characters or archaic words and phrases modernized — though this film does all that too. I’m talking about re-writing Shakespeare.

I know, some of you traditionalists are probably spitting bile right now. But the kicker is, according to the press notes for the film, Fellowes and producer Ileen Maisel “wanted to give the modern audience a traditional, romantic version of the story.” (Setting aside the idea there is a version of Romeo and Juliet that is somehow not romantic…) The key word is “traditional” — and there’s the rub. While perhaps most would agree that an Italian setting and medieval costumes are acceptably traditional, only during the Restoration was it traditional to re-write the Bard. (And how did that work out for them? Quick show of hands. How many of you have seen The Enchanted Isle? How many The Tempest?)

But stay, there is a secondary goal the filmmakers had. Fellowes continues: “we also wanted to make it accessible and new.” So that’s why the text is changed, a determination “not to exclude” the “young audience”. Let us examine how they did.

How much of the text is changed? On a recent radio program, he estimated that only 20% of the text has changed, which — not having the play memorized myself — sounds about right. But what a 20%. And most of the changes are on the order of simplifying elaborate metaphors… you know, the poetry.

Fellowes is a clever writer, and his alterations are in the spirit of the original play. Most of them will pass unnoticed by those who haven’t studied the text. A few of them are conspicuously out of tune, as when Romeo tells the Friar “intentions pave the road to Hell” or Juliet “if your heart like mine is full then tell the joy that ‘waits us this night.” The super-famous lines are left intact, near as I could gather, with all the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and ‘wherefores’. I was baffled, frankly, by what didn’t change. Surely it offends modern sensibilities to have Juliet compared to the jewel that hangs on an Ethiope’s ear. And why reproduce the extended, culturally outmoded wordplay about palmers and pilgrims but change “utters” to “issues” in the Apothecary’s line Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s law / Is death to any he that utters them.?

In other words, Fellowes and his collaborators are like the second suitor in Merchant of Venice who chooses silver over gold. In compromising, they bungle both goals of being traditional and accessible. (For those keeping score at home, the Lead Casket option — jettisoning Shakespeare’s text altogether — was the correct answer. See West Side Story — or, more recently, Warm Bodies.)

As any Shakespeare-lover can tell you, accessibility is the job of the actors and the director. In the recent BBC/PBS version of Richard II (Part I of The Hollow Crown) actor Ben Whishaw and director Rupert Goold brilliantly brought forward the messiah complex of the title character through performance, camera angles, costumes and set decoration. You could watch the film with the sound off and understand it perfectly. (But you never would because dang, that Shakespeare guy could write!)

So how did Carlei, his crew, and his actors fare? They did okay. Douglas Booth (“Romeo”) is actually a decent actor, much better than you expect from a guy who looks like a male model. I liked him more than the Oscar-nominated Hailee Steinfeld (“Juliet”), who strikes me much the same way Clare Danes did: a bit gawky and uncomfortable with the language. (Sorry, but Olivia Hussey is still the only Juliet on film I believe Romeo would fall for instantly.) The chemistry between them was never allowed to build much erotic charge, since they were blocked to speak to each other and kiss almost immediately in every scene they shared together.

Of the supporting players, I would single out Damian Lewis (“Lord Capulet”), Natascha McElhone (“Lady Capulet”) and Kodi Smit-Mcphee (“Benvolio”) as particularly good. Some of the bigger names, like Paul Giamatti (“Friar Laurence”) and Stellan Skarsgard (“Prince Escalus”) I could take or leave. Lesley Manville does what she can with a “Nurse” who has most of her funny lines cut.

As far as Carlei & company’s handling of the visuals, I liked the handsome, detailed art direction of the film, but found the lighting over-wrought. It looks like a perfume commercial, or the cover of a bodice-ripper come to life. (This may be no accident, since the film was funded in part by the Swarovski family’s entertainment arm, they of the crystal curtain at the Academy Awards.) It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the score, by Abel Korzeniowski, insists on underlining every kiss with a swell of syrupy violins.

If you had any doubt that this was a movie to appeal to young women over young men, you need only look at the short and perfunctory sword fights, which display little in the way of imaginative choreography or visceral thrills. The love scenes are innocent and chaste, without a whiff of adolescent hormones.

The movie chooses one “tradition” that may irk purists, popularized, according to my research, by David Garrick’s 19th Century version of the play. In this version, Juliet awakens after Romeo has ingested the poison but before he has died. Thus the lovers are allowed to share a final moment before they shuffle off their mortal coils. This might’ve even seemed like an innovation — if we hadn’t just seen it in the Baz Luhrmann/Craig Pearce version.

Of all the adjustments, I was not a fan of how the film removed Shakespeare’s ironies surrounding Friar John’s inability to deliver Friar Laurence’s letter and instead replaced it with a bit of PR for the church. I can only guess the filmmakers felt a mention of the plague didn’t fit in their glossy, romantic world.

But, at the end of the day, this story — which was itself adapted by Shakespeare from a centuries-old tradition — can withstand much more than a few well-intentioned-but-misguided filmmakers have thrown at it (Cf. Gnomeo & Juliet which does the story with garden gnomes, Elton John songs and a happy ending). Even in my cynical Los Angeles press screening, there were a few tears at the end. (Not mine, I only cry tears that are earned. And also at most Nic Cage performances.)

I try to judge filmmakers by their own goals. In my opinion, this film’s approach does not find the right balance of “traditional” and “accessible” — but do you, fellow Shakespeare geeks, disagree? Or are those goals simply mutually exclusive? And what would a faithful version consist of? Most film versions of the story, including Zeffirelli’s, have only used one third of the lines Shakespeare wrote. Will we ever see a film version that, like Branagh’s Hamlet, seeks to do justice to a complete text? I am eagerly awaiting the next generation’s answers.

Review : Two Gentlemen of Boston Common (Part 2)

July 29, 2013February 11, 2017 ~ duane ~ 2 Comments

…ok, where was I?

It’s past 9pm on Friday night. We’re wet, having sat in the rain for 45 minutes waiting for the show to start. Stephen Maler, the director, comes out to tell us that while he may have said for years that every audience is the best audience ever, seriously, *we* are the best audience ever.

Enter Kennedy, the local radio show host who is now apparently going to be a regular because she was here last year as well? She says, “Last year I told a knock knock joke, and it went over maybe 50-50…”

Yeah, I remember, because IT WAS MY JOKE YOU TOLD. I wondered what jokes she’d tell this year when she promised two new ones.

New? She went with “prose before hoes” and Shakespeare not being able get a drink at the pub because “he’s Bard.” I wish she’d kept googling, she could have come up with something better that Bardfilm or I had written!

Once again I watch as she leaves the stage thinking that I might chase her down and introduce myself, but she disappears.

Two Gents is pretty unknown to anybody who’s not a Shakespeare fan, so I’ve had to summarize it for wife, friends, coworkers and whoever else asked me what I was doing for the weekend. Keep in mind that the last time I read it was maybe 20 years ago, so I’m not too big on the details as well. Here’s what I’ve been telling people:

Ok, Proteus and Valentine are best friends in Verona. Proteus is in love with Julia. Valentine heads off to Milan, where he falls in love with Sylvia. Proteus is sent off to Milan as well for some reason, where he too falls in love with Sylvia (promptly leaving Julia in the dust). Julia, meanwhile, dresses up like a boy to follow Proteus to Milan. Proteus decides that he can get Sylvia all for himself if he screws over Valentine to the Duke. This plan works, Valentine is banished and ends up leading a band of outlaws. Proteus meanwhile thinks he’ll have Sylvia all to himself, but she’s still into Valentine so she runs away, and promptly gets captured by the outlaws. Well, Proteus rescues her from the outlaws and when she’s not appropriately appreciative enough he says that he’ll just have his way with her regardless, causing Valentine to come to her rescue. Proteus then apologizes for his bad behavior, and his best pal Valentine immediately forgive him and says oh you can have Sylvia. But Sylvia reminds Proteus of his love for Julia, Julia unveils that she’s been hanging out with them dressed as a boy, and Proteus decides to go back with her. The Duke comes in, everybody’s forgiven (including the outlaws), and we end on the promise of a double wedding just like always. Oh, and there’s a dog. The dog’s supposed to be funny.

The set is supposed to be some sort of Las Vegas / nightclub thing, with plenty of singing and showgirls dancing. The actual characters break into song, it’s not like a background track. Julia sings “Fever”, Proteus sings “Witchcraft,” that kind of thing. The back wall is decorated with neon nightclub signs, and the one labelled “Hermione’s Place” is very surreal to me, I try to remember if there’s a Hermione in this play.

Proteus (left) bids farewell to Valentine.

I tried to take pictures this year since we were close enough, but between the rain and the distance and the darkness they didn’t come out great. Hopefully you at least get the idea of what we were seeing.

The play starts with Proteus and Valentine saying their farewells as Valentine is off to see the world, while Proteus will stay home with Julia. It’s only a matter of minutes before I lean over to my wife, rub her arm, and whisper, “Shakespeare makes me so very happy. Thanks for staying!” I couldn’t even tell you what they were saying at that point, but it didn’t matter, you know? There’s that magic spell that comes with hearing a Shakespeare play, outside under the stars, and you experience bliss. It’s been almost 4 hours since we left the house to get here, but the words start flowing, and all that is erased, and it is totally worth it, just like every year.

I don’t really want to recap the entire show, mostly because it’s not up any more so it’s not like anybody’s going to rush down to see it. But also because I just didn’t love it. Here’s my highlights:

* They kept breaking character and playing to the audience, like pointing and winking whenever somebody laughed particularly loudly or “Woo!”ed at a joke. The Duke was shown at one point playing golf, and after a particularly bad drive he’d mutter “son of a bitch…” After intermission when Speed and Launce were doing some sort of vaudevillian schtick, Launce looks at the audience after a flopped joke, holds up a paper and says, “You know who wrote that joke? WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. That one killed during the plague! If you want to complain email williamshakespeare at bard of avon dot com.” <beat> “dot org.” That sort of thing. It was like they didn’t have enough faith in the material. And maybe that’s an accurate assumption to make, but then why pick this play?

Julia (seated) argues with Lucetta over a certain letter.

* There’s too much letter writing in this play, and it rapidly confused my wife (well, and me too). Speed, who works for Valentine, brought Proteus’ letter to Julia? But then Lucetta has the letter, and Julia tears it up, only to later try putting the pieces back together? Sylvia has Valentine write a letter to some imaginary friend, then tells him it’s not good enough, gives it back to him, tells him to write another one, and give it to himself? I knew the general plot of who loved who, but the letters lost me.

* The only characters that seem to get any stage time are Proteus and Julia (separately). And Proteus is a real dick. Seriously. Pardon my language but that’s the best word to use. He gives a big speech about how, to get Sylvia, he has to screw over both Julia and Valentine. Then goes ahead and does it. Then later he has to get Thurio (to whom Sylvia is betrothed) out of the picture. It’s quite clear that Sylvia has no interest in him, but that doesn’t stop him. This actually leads us to the famous “near rape”(?) scene. They’ve done a good job of showing Sylvia escaping the outlaws, only to ultimately be captured. But when Proteus arrives to rescue her, she then runs from him the same way she ran from the outlaws. So he delivers his “I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arms’ end,
And love you ‘gainst the nature of love,–force ye.” line and goes in for what can best be described as an aggressive hug, like something out of a 1950’s movie where you have to show the bad guy doing bad things but still keep it clean. No matter, though, because Valentine shows up and we have a quick fight scene to end Proteus’ evil ways.

Our two clowns, Launce and Speed, with Crab the dog.

* What’s the dog supposed to do? All our did was look cute. When Launce comes out and says “I have a dog…” people cheered in anticipation. So out comes a cute dog, who does little more than wag his (her?) tail and eat treats. Launce does his whole routine about his mother and father as shoes, and that probably could have gotten more laughs (“No, the left shoe is my mother, it has the worser sole.” Come on, that’s funny!) Is the whole joke that the dog just sits there and says nothing?

* The best scene, and I’m not even sure where it appears in the script, is when Sylvia sits down with Julia (dressed as a boy) to talk about Proteus’ love for “her”. That alone added more depth to both characters than anything else I saw. Now we can understand why Sylvia hates Proteus – she knows how quickly he turned on his former love so she knows what kind of man she is. And we get to understand why Julia would stay next to Proteus even though, right in front of her face, he’s forswearing her and proclaiming his love for another woman.

* This leads to what I thought was the funniest scene, and one of the few times I’ll forgive them for the random “extra” bits:

PROTEUS

How! let me see:
Why, this is the ring I gave to Julia.

JULIA

O, cry you mercy, sir, I have mistook:
This is the ring you sent to Silvia.

PROTEUS

But how camest thou by this ring? At my depart
I gave this unto Julia.

JULIA

And Julia herself did give it me;
And Julia herself hath brought it hither. <pause, as all stare at her confused> REALLY?! <takes off her cap, shakes out her hair>

PROTEUS

How! Julia!

Overall I come away with the same thought I went into it – it’s not that great of a play. There aren’t many characters to appreciate (except the scorned Julia), and everybody seems pretty stupid and unsympathetic (what with the whole “Oh, you just tried to rape Sylvia, but you apologized, so you can have Sylvia” sort of thing going on). The clowns’ jokes are all “cheap pops” that get a laugh here and there but I didn’t see anybody rolling in the aisles.

Over the weekend as we told the story of how hard it was to go see the show, and people asked why we even bother, I took the easy path – I explained that Shakespeare’s plays are like my bucket list, and I’d not seen this one so even if it’s not a great one I still need to see it. The real reason, of course, is back a few paragraphs and happened within the first five minutes of the play.

Shakespeare makes me so very happy.

It’s My Much Ado Review, Coming Right At You

July 3, 2013February 11, 2017 ~ duane ~ 6 Comments

So I did get to see Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing last week, and only now am I finding the time to write about it. This is no way reflects how much I loved this movie.

Loved it. Love love loved. I was not yet out of the movie theatre before I tweeted something like “A revolution in Shakespeare movie making.”

Now, let’s talk about it in more detail. I’m pretty sure that all my regular readers already know the details, but I’ll take you through them just in case. Director Joss Whedon and a bunch of his friends regularly hang out at his house and do script read-throughs like regular people might play board games. These friends of his include Alexis Denisof, Amy Acker and Nathan Fillion, all of whom you’ve seen before in various Whedon creations (Buffy, Firefly, Avengers, etc…) Yes, I said Avengers — Agent Phil Coulson is even in this one.

So, anyway, Whedon says to his crew one day, “This time we’re going to film it.” And there you have it. Twelve days of filming his friends, at his house, using his own stuff as props.

What we get is not perfect, and it’s driving some of the Shakespeare purists nuts, but I love the end result. I want him to do this again and again.

Much Ado About Nothing maps wonderfully to our situation. Leonato basically welcomes some very important guests to his house and throws a huge party, which soon turns into a wedding (and then a funeral, and then a wedding). You absolutely buy this, right from the beginning. The limousines arrive outside, Leonato and his family go to greet their guests, and it all just works. We even get a shot of Benedick and Claudio being led up to the room where they’ll be staying, decorated with stuffed animals – *exactly* what happens when guests come to stay at someone’s house and get put up in whatever rooms are available (in this case perhaps a daughter’s room?) We walk the halls with characters, we spot the housekeepers putting away laundry in the background. Later we’ll see Benedick running up and down the stairs in sweatpants, getting in his daily workout. There was never a time in this movie that I did not think, “Ok, cool, a rich guy is putting up guests in his house for the week” … because that’s exactly what was happening. Genius.

The masquerade scene is absolutely gorgeous. There’s entertainment, there’s the pool, there’s groups of people just hanging out and chatting. Something that I loved, that I wish he’d carried through the whole movie, is that the soundtrack turns out to be a guest singing at the piano. After all, none of us have a soundtrack to our lives, but we do occasionally walk into situations where there is music. In a later scene we again hear music, only to discover that Don Pedro has found a guitar and is sitting in the corner picking away at it while people are talking.

Ok, let’s talk about the characters. I could talk all day about how this movie looks, but what I’m sure everybody wants to know is how well they performed it. Let me say a couple of things up front to set the stage. I think my favorite performance was Reed Diamond’s Don Pedro. I don’t know what sort of Shakespeare experience he’s got, but I thought his delivery was spot on, hitting the right combination of selling the Shakespeare while still acting his part, if that makes sense. He was the visiting dignitary, a guest in Leonato’s home. Half the time he looks like he might have been drunk, but that was also totally in character.

Second favorite? Fran Kranz as Claudio. This version of the play tries to make it all about Claudio/Hero, rather than Benedick/Beatrice, and I’m ok with that. This will drive MAAN fans nuts, I’m sure (more on the weaknesses of B&B in a bit). I realized very quickly that this was turning into a wonderful romantic movie that just happened to be a Shakespeare movie, rather than the other way around, if that makes sense. We Shakespeare geeks can talk about Claudio/Hero as being this little side story when really we want to dig into the interchange between Benedick and Beatrice, but really, does the random movie goer with no background knowledge of the story want that? If you just follow the plot, doesn’t it make more sense that people would think it’s more about Claudio? Claudio’s the one getting married (and he tells his friend Benedick about it). Claudio’s the one that gets screwed over, and then screws himself over by reacting so poorly over the news, and Claudio’s the one that has to fix it in the end.

Something that I really liked is that Don Pedro and Claudio were buddies throughout the show – everywhere you saw one, you saw the other. That worked perfectly for Don Pedro as the half drunk dignitary who just wandered from situation to situation trying to keep everybody happy, and it worked to elevate Claudio by always having him in the Don’s company, as if every time Benvolio showed up, the Prince entered as well. I’m not sure I love that analogy, I’ll work on it.

Ok, now let’s talk about the weaknesses. I, like many, did NOT like the chemistry between Benedick and Beatrice. I’m sure Whedon fans were excited to see Acker and Denisof as a couple again (apparently they were, in some other show?) but I know nothing about that. If anything, I recognize Denisof as one of Robin’s boyfriends(?) on How I Met Your Mother.

I thought Whedon would do more with Beatrice. The movie opens (I don’t think this is a spoiler) with a “next morning” scene, and a man slipping quietly from Beatrice’s bed and leaving without a word. “Interesting,” I’m thinking, “Is this supposed to establish that Beatrice is looking for love, and never finding it? Always ending up with the wrong guy?” But it turns out I completely misinterpreted that scene.

The thing is, while it’s established early that she is interested in Benedick, you never understand why. He’s a bit of an ass, right from the very beginning. The banter between the two can be done mutually, they’re both playing the same game. But here it’s far more obvious that Benedick goes for the easy cheap shots, and it visually upsets Beatrice when he does that. I think there’s even a line, I can’t remember off the top of my head, where she says almost exactly that. She’s having fun, he’s being mean. That, coupled with my earlier guess that Beatrice keeps getting involved with the wrong men, just points to Benedick as another one of the wrong ones, not Mr. Right.

Denisof’s Benedick is good when he’s doing the physical comedy. The scene where Don Pedro, Claudio and Leonato are trying to convince him that Beatrice loves him was hysterical, to the point of being ridiculous (it is painfully obvious that there’s no way they do not see him). Later when he starts strutting in front of Beatrice (knowing that she likes him) is again funny, but in a far more predictable way. But you know what? Sometimes predictable is ok, getting back to the idea of “the audience that just walked in without knowing what to expect.” People don’t always want to analyze. Sometimes they just want to laugh. And they’ll laugh, a lot, at Benedick.

A quick note on Nathan Fillion as Dogberry? From where I sit, he’s the biggest star. Maybe that’s just because I recognize him more than the others. So I was waiting for him for the whole movie. Is it fair to say that I laughed my head off the entire time, and yet I was disappointed? It’s as if he was the least comfortable with his Shakespeare, and decided that he was going to “make it his own.” Everything he does and says is brilliantly funny, but it feels the least like Shakespeare. Does that make sense? If you didn’t know he was doing Shakespeare, you might not even realize it. Again, this is one of those situations that I think works best for the non-Shakespeare audience, so my disappointment comes more from the fact that I was hoping to see out of him what I saw out of Don Pedro – somebody who could deliver a believable, entertaining character, while still leaving no doubt that he was performing Shakespeare.

I’ve got to wrap this up, so let me see if I can explain why I love it so much despite its “flaws”. I love the idea of a small, intimate Shakespeare movie like this. A bunch of friends get together in close quarters for a little while. There are fights, there are disagreements, there is laughter, there is arguing, and everybody makes up in the end. If you judge a movie like this primarily on its Shakespeare, it will likely come up short. But if you want your Shakespeare to be timeless and universal, the kind of story that’s been relevant to audiences for four hundred years and will continue to be for another four hundred? Whedon’s approach demonstrates a whole new way to go about that. It’s not just the intimate setting. The lopsidedness of some of the performances only adds to it. Some are excellent in their delivery, some aren’t. It’s like a Shakespearean dial that gets turned to low in some scenes and medium-high in others. When others have done “modern Shakespeare” they’ll just go ahead and rewrite most of it, leaving only the key lines. That’s awful. That points a big spotlight at the text and says “Look where we shoehorned in that line!” What we get in Whedon’s version isn’t even planned. It’s not like he told Reed Diamond to bring the Shakespeare more than, say, Don John. He threw all of his ingredients into this particular pot, stirre it around a bit, and let everybody find their stride. The result is natural, approachable, and wonderful. Go see it, preferably with someone who knows nothing about Shakespeare, then ask their opinion.

A quick note on parental guidance, and bringing the kids, since everybody knows this is an issue with me. I will not be letting the kids see this one, for two or three particular scenes. First is the “morning after” scene I spoke of that opens up the movie. This one isn’t too bad, though, and it’s easily skipped past. Second comes a scene that makes it obvious that Don John and Conrad (who is played by a woman here) are a couple. This includes getting horizontal on the bed and helping her out of her clothes. Hmmm. Little bit harder to explain away that one, since it is a long scene. And then of course at the end is the Margaret/Borachio scene, which plays out like it always has (well, since Branagh I guess). None of these scenes have any overt nudity, it’s primarily a question of what else happens. The Don John / Conrad scene is probably the worst, since it involves the most overtly sexual contact between the two.