‘Much Ado’ a breezy, if unfair, interpretation

Last summer, Project Shakespeare -- a nonprofit organization that mingles high-school students with local actors in a six-week workshop culminating in a performance -- captured the spirit of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with a surprising amount of dead-on accuracy.

Director Dana Martin's current mounting of "Much Ado About Nothing" is not what I'd call a fair interpretation of the script. But it's breezy and pleasing.

Modernized here and set in a garden atmosphere (simply but effectively designed by Martin with subdued, festive lighting by David J. Diaz), the play gives us one of dramatic literature's most amusing love/hate relationships in Beatrice (Kristen Henley) and Benedick (Alex Robert Holmes). They're vain, argumentative, smart asses and hopelessly in love with one another.

It helps considerably that Henley and Holmes are always worth watching. Henley communicates an attractively combative spirit that makes it easy to believe it would take a special man to woo and win her. Holmes is her equal in cynical posturing. And while the tall and very thin actor is not, physically, what some might call a leading-man type, he projects a sensuality that leading men should envy.

Joe Watkins as Claudio is amusing in his ability to show us how uncomfortable he feels in matters of delicacy. He seems like a man who belongs on a battlefield, not in genteel society. And Brittany Maloney as his love interest, Hero, is quirky and self-amused enough to make the role her own.

Too often, though, Martin doesn't pay enough attention to character detail. Leonata, for example (Leonato in the original script, but feminized here by Kathryn Percival) is supposed to be a governor of great social prestige. Percival plays the character as if she were a commoner; one of the girls. Oscar Fabela is supposed to be the exemplary solider and nobleman Don Pedro, but Fabela struts about with such little physical discipline that you have trouble believing he's ever seen an army, let alone led one. The working-class characters that provide so much comic relief are played so broadly that their "sure-fire" scenes fall flat. And too many dramatic set-ups -- the big ones involving resurrection and life-and-death challenges -- don't pay off because the climaxes are clumsily executed.

What makes the show nonetheless always enjoyable is the light-hearted air Martin manages to maintain. The production feels like an adult summer fairy-tale. It belongs in its garden setting.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.