I left my house in the morning and traveled to Denver, in what turned out to be a more tightly scheduled trip than I had desired. I drove up to Boulder, quickly checked in to my hotel, and then immediately attended the first play of my visit at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (I didn’t even have time to eat all day). I saw another production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (less than two weeks after seeing SPARC’s production of the same play).
As usual with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival performances, the acting and production were very good. This production was a little less abbreviated than the last one I saw in Livermore, but the scenes with the constables and guard were not overly long and mildly entertaining. The overall setting seemed to be Italy, but with a 1920s flapper-motif underlying it. There were two aspects that I didn’t love: the characters of Benedick and Beatrice were played for broad comedy being quite over the top, and silly — which was a bit much for me; and there was too much breaking of the 4th wall, pandering to the audience.
Besides these shortcomings, perhaps accentuated by the fact that I’d just seen another version of the play, it was a very enjoyable evening and first play of the run. And there were even a few sprinkling drops of rain.
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