Much Ado About Something

Last night we had tickets to see Much Ado About Nothing, a production of the Great Lakes Theater Festival at Cleveland's Hanna Theater. But the Festival has canceled all its productions until the fall. I was really looking forward to this one because I used to teach that play to my 8th graders at Harmon School the last few years (1994-97) of my public-school teaching career. And I loved doing so.

I had started teaching a Shakespeare play in my 8th grade classes during the 1985-86 school year, and up until 1994 (Kenneth Branagh's fine film of Much Ado had come out the year before), I used The Taming of the Shrew—snd showed my classes Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 film of the play, the one starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. (Link to some video.)

I had fun with that play, too--the war between the sexes. Not, uh, irrelevant in middle school! And in that play the Bard employs a lot of devices he uses in other comedies: cross-dressing, deception, foolish servants, and the old people-are-not-always-who-they-appear-to-be theme.

Later, by the way, I got to see a couple of my former Harmon students--our son, Steve, and Andy Paul—play key roles in a production of the play at Western Reserve Academy. Andy played Petruchio; Steve, Lucentio. The two lover-boys!

Anyway, once I saw the Branagh film, I knew I had to shift to Much Ado. Branagh and his then-wife, Emma Thompson, played Benedick and Beatrice, and in the cast were John Wick (uh, Keanu Reeves), Robert Sean Leonard, Kate Beckinsale, Denzel Washington, and Michael Keaton--mostly performers that all the kids had seen before, except Beckinsale, who would go on to her own notable career).

Link to some video.

Also, the themes were powerful--and relevant. Betrayal and lies, gender roles, forgiveness.

Re: forgiveness. At the end of the play when Hero forgives Claudio for his grotesque behavior at what was supposed to be their wedding (he's been misled--has thought she betrayed him; he publicly shames her at the broken wedding), I remember one day a young woman in my class cried out, as we were reading that scene aloud, "Why did she forgive him!"

And a great conversation ensued.

By those later years of mine, I'd adopted the technique of reading the play aloud with the kids in class. That way I could clarify things that were difficult, could ignore things that weren't really all that relevant, and answer questions as we went along. (I used this technique later with Hamlet at Western Reserve Academy.)

I'd also spent some weeks, prior to our reading, introducing the kids to Elizabethan England and its ways, to Shakespeare's life (about which we don't know a whole lot), to the conspiracy theories about who really wrote the plays (he did). 

I showed them a gazillion slides I'd taken in England--London, Stratford-upon-Avon. We listened to Elizabethan music, learned and played Elizabethan games, etc. I had a ball.

One of my final years, having taught the kids about thee, thou, thy, thine, I required them to use those words in our class. That was fun, too!

Then ... retirement in January 1997.

By then, Joyce and I were season-ticket holders at Great Lakes (I'd several times supervised field trips down there to see productions--including Romeo and Juliet). We'd see, oh, four or five shows each season, had very good seats (close to an exit!), and just had a wonderful time.

Earlier this year, we couldn't go see their production of Sleuth, so we'd given our tickets to our son and daughter-in-law, and they had a grand time, too.

Anyway, now that my health does not allow us to spend a week each summer at the Stratford Festival up in Canada (we saw eleven plays in six days for about 15 years!), the GLTF was our principal contact with the theater world. And now ... this season's canceled.

We donated our tickets back to the company (declined a refund). We want them to continue.

We want to go there again. And again. And again. And ...