From the Pit

"Much Ado About Nothing" is by all odds-or most odds anyway-much livelier and much funnier than many of Shakespeare's other comedies, like "The Taming of the Shrew" and "As You Like It," that are produced more frequently. It is surprising that it is so rarely done, and Jane Cowl, riding in on the Harvard Dramatic Club's tailstream, is reported to be readying a production of "Much Ado" for Broadway next season. The play has not appeared in Boston since 1930, when the Stratford-on-Avon players did it and got good notices.

The HDC-Radcliffe Idler production that opens in Sanders Theatre tomorrow evening retains the things that are time-less about Shakespeare, but prunes the obsolete puns and the long speeches, and plays "Much Ado," which is after all supposed to be a lot of fun, strictly for laughs.

It seemed at first that the entrepreneurs behind the HD-Idler job had missed a point in not making more use of Sanders' natural similarities to the Elizabethan theatre. The original Sanders was a model of the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's day, and today's Sanders is still quite Elizabethan.

But to use only the balcony of Sanders, and just remove the orchestra seats-the straw-floored pit would not be favored by modern theatre-goers-would present difficulties. In the first place, many of HD's sponsors are old creatures who will eat up Shakespeare but who wouldn't be able to see or hear unless they were well in front. The idea was pretty startling, moreover, for people who can't see choice seats going to waste for the sake of antiquity. It would have been a little difficult, too, to seat an assortment of Elizabethan fops on stage, or perhaps that would have been carrying Elizabethanism too far.

At any rate, the way things are now the peanut-galleryites will have the breaks, if they keep Queen Bess and the Globe Theatre in mind, and the people in the orchestra will be peasants, even if they won't have to stand.

HD says it's not trying to recapture the petty minutiae of the sixteenth century anyway. Shakespeare does mean something quite unacademic today, and the Dramatic Club aims to keep him alive. Theodore Spencer and Fritz Jessner have accomplished the revitalization, with a blue pencil. The Elizabethans loved the long speeches, but modern movie-trained audiences would walk out on them.

The costumes for the present production are Elizabethan, but simple, unlike the gilt edged robes that marred an otherwise stylized "Tempest," or the even more plushy ones of Maurice Evans' "Macbeth."

The sets, too, are very simple, and depend almost entirely on lighting. Shakespeare did not rely on sets, nor of course on lighting, and simplicity, it is hoped, will make for a more fluid interpretation. But the big words of the English Department are out of place here: the laugh's the thing tomorrow night. jgt