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Much Ado about Tarragon production

Much Ado ensemble at Tarragon
MUCH MORE OF THIS: Reviewer says for all its winning ways the Bollywood ambitions don’t go far enough in Much Ado About Nothing. He wanted to see more dance sequences like these, and more of the well-chosen musical numbers.

REVIEW

Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare, directed by Richard Rose with consulting director Ravi Jain, running at Tarragon Theatre’s Mainspace to May 31.

Tarragon’s new Bollywood-injected production of Much Ado About Nothing, which trades a 16th-century Italian estate for a modern Indian-Canadian family’s Brampton mansion, gave me a positive first impression before a single line had yet been spoken.

Unlike other, more conventionally “creative” interpretations, this one actually renamed several characters in Shakespeare’s tale of two misled couples to better reflect their new roots. Governor Leonato became Mayor Ranjit of Brampton (David Adams), his daughter Hero became Sita (Sarena Parmar) and her beloved Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, became Lord Tata (Kawa Ada). The other central couple, Hero’s sharp-witted cousin Beatrice and Pedro’s companion Benedick, became Thara (Anusree Roy) and Benedict (Alon Nashman), the latter serving as Chief Financial Officer of Bramalea.

I’m not a purist when it comes to Shakespeare. I was the student who wondered why Baz Luhrmann didn’t replace the word “sword” with “gun” in his 1996 retelling of Romeo & Juliet. (Granted, he printed the word “sword” on the guns, a much better joke to my adult eyes. But I digress.)

So when 30 seconds into this production one of the characters actually used the word “Brampton,” my heart sang.

It gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view): Tata and Benedict’s unseen enemies aren’t countries, but rival financiers from Thornhill; in his famous monologue decrying his friend’s doe-eyed adoration, Benedict complains not that Tata has fallen for “the tabor and the pipe,” but the sitar and R&B; and rather than God, the Indian characters invoke Vishnu and greet each other with “Namaste.”

Much Ado About Nothing actually has the perfect foundation for such an experiment, since much of the script is written in prose rather than iambic pentameter. It allows director Richard Rose and consulting director Ravi Jain to infuse the story with modern slang without affecting the rhythm of Shakespeare’s dialogue.

The purist, of course, might argue the play’s use of slang is distracting and obscures the poetry of the original. That argument has merit: my scattered attempts to identify which elements were Shakespeare’s (turns out Will wasn’t above making a less-than-respectable pun out of “stuffed maid”) and which were added here (my memory is fuzzy, but I’ll bet the box of Timbits eaten by John Cleland’s Constable Verges that the original didn’t reference ABBA) occasionally broke the production’s spell.

Add the thick Hindi accents, a main character who delivered half her dialogue with subtitles, and the head-scratching decision to give the two constables thick Newfoundland accents and you have at least four elements that could be difficult enough to understand on their own becoming much more difficult to understand when mixed together. Though she’s not a purist, my friend who watched the show with me argued that jettisoning one or two of these elements might have sharpened the play’s clarity, and I have to admit she had a point.

But which element to lose? The Newfoundland officers (Cleland and Anand Rajaram’s Constable Dan Singh — Dogberry in the original) are by far the show’s funniest element, crowd-pleasers who were applauded every time they left the stage. The Hindi accents added to the verisimilitude, as did the modern slang.

If anything, the Bollywood ambitions don’t go far enough. The dance sequences are few and far between, as are the well-chosen musical numbers.

But these are all minor quibbles in light of the infectious sense of fun. I enjoyed this version of Much Ado About Nothing, and judging from the laughter and applause, most of the audience did too.