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| Ella Smith and Colin Wulff as Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel. Photo by Tessa Flannery. |
Seen on: Thursday, 2/16/17.
My grade: C+
Plot and Background
The King of Navarre, his brother John the Bastard, and his two friends Claudio and Berowne, vow to eschew romance and dedicate themselves to their studies, just in time for a visit from the Princess of France, her sister Hero, her cousin Rosaline, and Margaret. Romantic hijinks ensue, but when the Princess receives word that her father has died, the four ladies lay aside flirtations to return home. When the characters reconvene in France over a year later, resentments brew among spurned lovers while a new romance is kindled between Hero and Claudio. Meanwhile, Constables Dogberry and Verges get up to their own hijinks, romantic and otherwise, and things don't end the way you think they will. Bottoms Dream, founded in 2013, is dedicated to reinventing classic texts, notably through their Weaving series, where they combine the text and story of two of Shakespeare's plays to form a new hybrid story. The Bride is a weaving of Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing.
What I Knew Beforehand
I reviewed Bottoms Dream's last weaving, The Ghost, and was impressed with the work I saw. I was also extremely familiar with Much Ado (probably my favorite Shakespeare comedy, thanks in large part to Kenneth Branagh's film), and fairly familiar with Love's Labour's Lost.
Thoughts:
Play: I wanted to like this more than I did. There are some excellent ideas in play - the idea of combining these two plays, especially as regards the inner workings of the various different romantic matches, is appealing on its own. The liberal use of music throughout, played by the ensemble, lends a charming lightness. The framing notion of a trunk of costumes, distributed while the cast assembles the space, tells us that this is a story being told, in the old sense. Unfortunately, there's a lack of coherency among all these elements. I craved more of an intermingling of the two source texts, as was done in The Ghost - while there was some threading of Much Ado into the Love's Labour's half, and vice versa, they were largely treated as acts one and two of a larger narrative, which then ultimately felt more like two one-act adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. Most of the characters' major transitions happened over the intermission, such as Berowne's and Rosaline's twisting bittersweet resentments, or Verges's and Hero's shifting affections. The company could have gone so much farther than they did and instead couched too heavily in the narratives as they already existed. It didn't help that the production threw into even starker relief how bewilderingly large the number of characters Love's Labour's contains; though to its credit, the cast did its level best to maintain clarity across all the double- and triple-casting (this part of the troupe of players telling a story worked quite well). The music very rarely felt character-born or even comfortable to the performers (the exceptions being the haunting duet between Verges and the Queen and the final number), and sometimes contained inexplicable dissonances (a doo-wop song with acoustic guitar accompaniment?). And while I appreciated the surprising turns that concluded the narrative, these choices led me to wonder why the company chose two comedies and removed so much of the comedy within.
