THE USE OF MUSIC IN MUCH ADO AND AS YOU LIKE IT
(c)1993 David Lefkowitz.
Shakespeare knew both the appeal of music and its utility. More than a pretty interlude, a song could give an audience rest from its hard concentration, set the mood, and plant the thematic seed for upcoming events. Music is employed in both Kenneth Branagh’s film of “Much Ado About Nothing” and Westerly Shakespeare in the Park’s As You Like It, the former with often perilous abandon, the latter more conventionally, though leavened by (sometimes unintentional) humor.
To establish its mood of summery sexiness cloaking a melancholy undertow, Branagh’s film opens with song lyrics, block-lettered across the screen as Emma Thompson’s knowing, unsmooth yet sensual voice seems to sing them to string accompaniment. Already there’s cleverness afoot, because we soon realize Thompson’s recitation is no disconnected fillip; the camera ultimately “finds” Beatrice reading from a book of sonnets. As her singing has now shifted into spoken verse, so may the film.
Westerly’s As You like It, directed by Harland Meltzer, announces its musical intentions in time-honored fashion: a trumpet fanfare, followed by Elizabethan music (or is it Elizabethan-style music by composer Andrew Wilder?) as pleasant as it is nondescript. We’re immediately cued that this will be a traditional staging, and that Westerly’s small-budgeted, theatre-in-the-park has gone to the trouble and expense of providing appropriate recorded music.
Save for fleeting melodic interludes to accompany actors as they get on and off the stage, Meltzer dispenses with music during scenes. Conversely, the film medium being better suited to musical underscoring, “Much Ado” brings up the strings at every emotional opportunity, from the town’s frolicsome preparation for the soldiers’ return to Claudio’s ecstatic discovery of his bride’s identity.
Branagh isn’t always subtle. The ominous music that tails Keanu Reaves’s Don Pedro might as well come from a Hollywood B-movie (File Under: “Bad Guy”) for all its variation and nuance. Even worse are the set pieces, which, after the rousing credit sequence, become increasingly mannered. A costume dance at court is marred by its needlessly in-your-face editing, and Beatrice and Benedick’s independent realization of their mutual passion, which climaxes in an exquisite Thompson monologue, receives a visualization that is downright childish: Bea swings, Ben splashes—both superimposed as music soars. Spare me.
No hit single is going to come from Branagh’s “Much Ado,” although the song at Hero’s funeral has the same syrupy, static presentation as the infamous “Love Theme” from Zeffirelli’s “Romeo And Juliet.”
To his credit, Harland Meltzer understands the action-stopping nature of songs in Shakespeare’s comedies and decides to have fun with it. Amiens (George Croom) is coaxed at every opportunity to sing, and he gets to do so roughly three and a half-times. Each new verse, though, is preceded by an “oh no, not again” eye-roll from the amiable Amiens, who thus stands for an audience’s impatience with non-essential stage time, and, on a deeper level, all people who find themselves compelled to give of their talent at every beck and call. What begins as a flattering favor becomes a trap, a dog-and-pony show to please the masters.
Closing “Much Ado” is a kingdom-wide, wedding dance party, filmed in a traveling shot that starts at ground level and ascends to bird’s eye view. Rather than emphasize the shared joy of all the inhabitants, the shot strikes me as claustrophobic and a bit cheesy, as it sucks in the entire location as if it were a Disney backlot. (Perhaps Branagh has been taking his Orson Welles comparisons too seriously and wanted to do a variation on the stagey cast-calls that ended Welles’s greatest films.)
Then again, we may count ourselves lucky Branagh did not put Aimee Marie Rzewuski in a flashbulb tree and tell her to sing, as Harland Meltzer does in As You Like It. As the “goddess of marriage,” Rzewuski’s supposed to seal the play’s happy ending with a benediction; instead she rends it with cracked notes and clinkers. It’s not a pleasant sound when her Hymen breaks.
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NOTES & BACKSTORY:
[June 2023] This unpublished piece was penned as a homework assignment when I studied as a Critic Fellow at the Eugene O’Neill Center’s National Critics Institute in July 1993. The prompt was to write about the use of music in two Shakespeare pieces we’d just seen: Kenneth Branagh’s film of Much Ado About Nothing and a Rhode Island summer theater’s outdoor staging of As You Like It.
I’m happy to say the Westerly Theater (now called The Colonial Theater) is still doing outdoor Bard every summer in Wilcox Park. I’m happy to say the Westerly Theater (now called The Colonial Theater) is still doing outdoor Bard every summer in Wilcox Park. I’m not so happy to say that founder Harland Meltzer resigned in 2018 when the theater’s board was in the midst of investigating two claims of sexual harassment against an (unnamed) employee at the theater.
The Collected Writings of... David Lefkowitz 