Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

Kenneth Branagh’s second Shakespearean adaptation for the screen, Much Ado About Nothing is Branagh in top form, dynamically presenting a faithful interpretation of Shakespeare’s original.

El director also quite notably dons his acting hat in this production, playing Signior Benedick in a battle of wits, wills, and wooing opposite the Lady Beatrice, played by Branagh’s real-life wife at the time of production, Emma Thompson.  Branagh and Thompson are a fantastic pairing here, bringing crucial chemistry as their love/hate relationship is so central to Much Ado.

Thompson and Branagh as Beatrice and Benedick

Branagh and Thompson aren’t the only two bringing their A-game to this adaptation; several other big-time actors deliver big-time performances here.  Denzel Washington, playing Prince of Aragon Don Pedro, is outstanding.  Washington simply commands the screen, and brings Shakespeare’s prince to life with the same exceptional conviction as he has so many modern characters throughout his career.  Washington does Shakespeare so well that I was surprised to not find more of it in his resume leading up to this film (apparently he played five characters, presumably more or less as an extra, in a 1979 production of Corialanus, starring Morgan Freeman in the lead role – I’ve got to see it!).

He knows he's good: Denzel as Don Pedro

Despite such steep competition, taking home the Shawn and Shakespeare Show Stealer Award for Much Ado with relative ease is Michael Keaton.  As Master Constable Dogberry, Keaton is just tremendously fun to watch.  He’s got great source material here of course; Dogberry is a particularly memorable character in the Shakespearean comic canon, but Keaton’s fantastic charisma and comic timing, that so light up the screen here in Much Ado, help to make Keaton’s performance remarkable in its own right.  He’s right on par here, for my money, with his brilliant performance as Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.

Keaton as Dogberry, ignoring his partner Verges (Ben Elton)

While there is so much going for this production of Much Ado, it is worth noting there are some plot points in Shakespeare’s original that are not the most modern – I’m thinking particularly of some less than empowering moments for the ladies, which I look forward to discussing in an upcoming blog on the play – and Branagh is, as I mentioned, admirably faithful to Shakespeare’s play.  Far from being a fault in the film, I personally appreciate Branagh’s respect for the play as it was written – there’d be too much to change to bring it up to date in that sense.  The feminist critique got my wheels turning in terms of analyzing the play, but it did nothing to deter my enjoyment of the film, which is outstanding.

See it for yourself: Much Ado About Nothing

The Comedy of Errors (at The Schubert Theatre, DeSales University on Thursday July 7th 2011)

A portion of the Errors cast (photo Lee A. Butz)

Performed as part of The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, and directed by Russell Treyz

Click here to find out more about the festival and to gettickets to see this show and other Shakespearean productions during the PSFsummer season

It was clear to me from the very first scene that this was going to be a production with a great sense of humor.  When actor Carl Wallnau came on stage as Egeon, a condemned merchant who has been searching for his twin sons, I prepared myself for the relatively straightforward exposition of what I knew to be a fair bit of backstory.  Egeon’s account is necessary in any medium to set up the play; his scene is sort of a prologue.  On paper, it’s interesting enough, but doesn’t make for a particularly memorable moment. So, when Wallnau launched into a hilarious retelling of Egeon’s woes, complete with a multitude of props, the assistance of a surprising number of actors, and a fair few tongue-in-cheek references to the festival itself, I realized that this production was going to be an incredible amount of fun.

Wallnau’s Egeon was not the only strong first impression here.  As Steve Burns (famed as the original host of Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues) initially took the stage as manservant Dromio of Syracuse, weighed down by enough luggage to take the whole cast camping, the physical comedy and well-timed ad-libs that would characterize the entire production had the crowd roaring with laughter.  Burns continued to mastermind the hilarity, embracing one bald audience member as his Dromio’s “Father Time,” a man with whom Burns went on to have a series of incredibly funny interactions.  Burns would later borrow programs and exchange glances with individual patrons, bringing the audience very literally into the action.  Burns was not alone in a masterful command of the stage; one by one characters burst on stage with so much energy that you couldn’t help but be swept up in the revelry, even when it wasn’t taking place partly in your aisle – which it often was.

Burns’ counterpart, Chris Faith, as Dromio of Ephesus, matched Burns’ hilarity blow for blow – and the blows abounded here in The Comedy of Errors.  As one set of long-separated identical twins, Faith and Burns made for a fantastic tag team in every sense of the term.  The pair took turns through the first four acts driving the comic action on the stage; between Faith’s desperate, stage-spanning attempts to evade a beating with a foreign object at the hands of his master Antipholus (well-played by Thomas Matthew Kelley), and Burns’ leap onto the back of his master Antipholus (identically well-played by Ian Bedford) with all the grace of a spritely Mexican luchador, the pair quite literally resembled a lovably outmatched pair of tiny wrestlers.

Steve Burns applying the aforementioned sleeperhold to Ian Bedford (photo by Lee A. Butz)

Some of my favorite wrestling in this production took place somewhat offstage.  As Burns’ Dromio wrestled with the misplaced affection of, and his unwitting betrothal to, the remarkably obese kitchen wench Nell, her booming offstage presence became a great highlight.  Though we never “see” Nell, Burns’ hopeless endeavor to describe her full girth to the audience – an attempt marked with fantastic physical ad-libs – was easily the most hysterical moment in production.

While the Dromios were an exceptional main event, as was to be expected here, and a number of other actors put in a fantastic performances – notably Eleanor Handley as a wonderful Adriana, and Brandon Meeks as a firm but fair Duke of Ephesus – one particular performer in this stellar ensemble was a wonderfully unexpected surprise.  On the page, the character Luciana is a dim-witted foil for her somewhat sharper sister, and a consistent purveyor of terrible advice to all and sundry, but far from a stand-out element of the play.  While Luciana may be somewhat outshone on Shakespeare’s page, actress Lauren Orkus did a brilliant job of bringing her to life and realizing her full comic potential on this stage.  As the man Luciana presumes to be her sister’s husband declares his love to her, Orkus delivers an enjoyable series of reactions with perfectly timed exclamations and other skillful comic subtleties which elevated the scene.  Orkus has a similar effect throughout the play, standing out and being hilarious in scenes where I did not expect to pay her character much mind.  She reminds me here of Kristen Chenoweth’s Olive Snook from Pushing Daisies, and Suzanne Somers’ Chrissy Snow from Three’s Company: a strong comic female supporting actress who can really make any given scene.  For all her efforts, and certainly for an exceptional performance, I am proud to present Lauren Orkus with the coveted Shawn and Shakespeare Show Stealer Award for this production.

Orkus on the left as Luciana, with Handley, right, as Adriana (photo by Lee A. Butz)

Orkus’ performance was one of a number of ingredients here that made this great play even more enjoyable to see than anyone could have expected.  There was a playful spirit driving the show, one which clearly resonated with both actors and audience.  In a Q&A after the performance, one member of the creative team referred to this energy as a conscious decision early in rehearsal to “embrace a style of performance” marked by the kind of lightheartedness that we had seen on stage.  That was clearly just the first of a number of great decisions, as a fun-loving, tongue-in-cheek mode of operations was incredibly well suited to this play, so full of both slapstick and clever wordplay on the page.  Director Russell Treyz, his production team, and the excellent cast did Shakespeare great justice here in bringing his Comedy of Errors to the stage.

I greatly regret that I was unable to post this review in enough time to get you up to the festival to see this fantastic production.  On the bright side though, the festival will be presenting productions of both Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both led by Comedy of Errors Artistic Director Patrick Mulcahy.  The Two Noble Kinsmen production will also feature a number of actors from the excellent Errors ensemble including the aforementioned Ian Bedford, Thomas Matthew Kelley, Eleanor Handley, and Shawn and Shakespeare award winning actress Lauren Orkus.  It is my great hope to catch the Two Noble Kinsmen, and I highly recommend you making similar arrangements.

l-r: My sister-in-law Mary Kate (DeSales alum), her former classmate Steve Burns, Chris Faith, and me (photo by Ann O'Brien)

The Tempest (2010)

Director Julie Taymor’s Tempest is the perfect storm: the cast, the effects, the costumes, the make-up – everything about this production is phenomenal.  The shame of it is that with Taymor busy trying not to kill anybody on Broadway in her exceedingly dangerous musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and with virtually no distribution for the film’s December 10^th 2010 release – can you even call four theaters in the whole country a release? – the spectacular Tempest has yet to receive the attention or the reception that it deserves.  Having been severely disappointed to realize on December 9^th, that my geographical region was not to be one of the four graced with a single theater playing The Tempest, I was furious to read blurbs in the press about the financially disappointing performance of the film after the opening weekend.  So allow me to briefly vent to all of those writers before I proceed with the review:

Hello, film industry geniuses.  If a film isn’t released in more theaters than I can count on one hand, THEN IT CAN’T POSSIBLY MAKE ANY MONEY!  That is, unless there are some 100,000 seat theaters somewhere in America that I don’t know about.

Sorry about that, I just love this film, and I was super salty that people were trashing it just because none of the power players involved made its release a big enough deal.

The irony is that the film itself is a testament to the power of great decision making. 

Titus (1999)

Little did I know, when I literally tried to pitch a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus to Quentin Tarantino several months ago, that critically acclaimed director Julie Taymor made her debut bringing Titus to the big screen back in 1999.  I guess that explains why Tarantino’s agent never got back to me.  Note to self: do more research before contacting Hollywood agents with your next big idea.  In fairness to Julie Taymor, I’ll say that I was dreading my viewing of Titus well before I hit play.  Shakespeare’s text is so gruesome and disturbing that I wasn’t sure I had the stomach to make it through the whole film.  But with Taymor’s Tempest on the way, I knew that I had to acknowledge this bold new voice in Shakespearean cinema.

I had braced myself for horror, but nothing could have prepared me for Titus’s opening scene.  Having expected the action to begin in ancient Rome, I was caught completely off guard when the first thing I saw was a young boy with a paper bag over his head, breaking his toys apart amid a large-scale ketchup explosion at a 1950s-era kitchen table. In fact, I was afraid I had inserted the wrong disc into my DVD player.  Though this fear turned out to be unfounded, the strange scene made for anxiety-filled viewing all the same.  Things did calm down for me moments later as a large man, dressed entirely in black, burst through the kitchen window to seemingly kidnap this child.  Normally, this would be alarming, but once you see the kind of mess the kid was making, you’ll accept the fact that he had to be stopped somehow.

As You Like It (2006)

By any standard, Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 production of As You Like It is exceptional.  It is both an incredibly entertaining film and – in my mind - a terrifically faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s original play.  In the DVD extra “From Page to Screen With Kenneth Branagh,” the director explains that, as a filmmaker adapting Shakespeare, “you’re trying to serve the story in the medium you’re working in” (emphasis added).  The point being that if you just stick to the text, then you don’t have a visually stunning movie; but throw the text out the window in order to make a Star Wars prequel-esque, special effects-heavy, cinematic explosion, then you’ve lost Shakespeare’s genius in the translation.   Brannagh makes neither mistake here.

In As You Like It, Branagh makes the bold decision to change the play’s setting from a French dukedom (of an uncertain time period) to the feudal Japan of the 19^th century.  In fact, as the film opened, I felt like the play was happening in the cover art of Weezer’s classic 1996 album Pinkerton.  

You should own this album.

As a huge fan, I was that much more excited about the movie.  The setting change was a make it or break it move for Branagh’s production, one which proves itself over the course of the film to be a brilliant decision. Shakespeare’s play begins with the hostile takeover by Duke Frederick already completed, but the cool new setting allows Brangh to stage it at the film’s outset as a ferocious samurai invasion.  Pairing that awesome open with seamless translation of Shakespeare’s “wrestling” in Act One to the sumo wrestling in the film, and you not only have a dynamite new setting, but also the brilliant juxtaposition of the dukedom’s violence and the peace we find in the Forest of Arden.

Henry V (1989)

I think it’s important to note that I don’t evaluate a film in the Shawn and Shakespeare Film Review Series solely on its own merit, but also on how effectively, and how faithfully, it presents Shakespeare’s original play.   In the case of Henry V, I realize that I am expecting a lot: I want the film to have everything I love in the play, and to be as faithful as possible to it – allotting, of course, for a reasonable degree of change in the transition from stage to screen; yet I also want all the bells and whistles that a motion picture can deliver.  I would indeed like my cake, and the privilege to eat it too.  In short, I know myself to be placing a pretty tall order.

Having said all that, there is no question in my mind that Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 production of Henry V is a great film (though I do ultimately have some complaints).  The greatest strength of this adaptation is a number of excellent performances.  Branagh himself is dynamic as Henry, and was even nominated for an Academy Award for the role (as well as for Best Director).  Derek Jacobi is awesome as the Chorus, and Branagh weaves Jacobi’s narration between scenes brilliantly. 

Hamlet (2009)

When I discovered that Doctor Who (David Tennant) plays Hamlet, and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) plays Claudius and the Ghost in this BBC-produced, Gregory Doran-directed version of Hamlet, I was beside myself with excitement. I grew up with Stewart’s Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and my wife and I have spent the last couple years catching up on (and loving every minute of) Tennant’s run as the tenth Doctor on Doctor Who. Needless to say, I was completely geeking out to realize so many of my favorite worlds had herein collided.

Love's Labor's Lost (2000)

I won’t lie. As I sat down to watch my first Netflixed selection in the Shawn and Shakespeare Film Review Series, it came as a complete surprise to me that Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 production of Love’s Labor’s Lost was actually a musical. Not having much experience of any kind with musicals, save that one trip to New York with my wife to get our Broadway on, I prepared to temper my review with a particularly large grain of salt. “It weirded me out, but what do I know?”

My worry was completely unfounded.