Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, Reviewed.
oss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing was filmed over the course of 12 days at Whedon’s Los Angeles home during a contractually required break between the shooting and post-production of his last project, the gargantuan superhero clustercuss that was The Avengers. As a kind of professional palate cleanser, Whedon and his wife Kai Cole, a producer, decided to get some friends together and whip up a secretly filmed, black-and-white, micro-budget adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved and oft-performed comedies. (If you made it through high school without having to memorize one-half of the big Beatrice/Benedick love scene for an audition piece, you must not have been a real drama person.)
Many of the actors assembled on Whedon and Cole’s rambling, terraced lawn were regulars from Whedon’s past TV shows—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, Firefly—or from the movies and Web series he’s moved on to create since. Their degree of experience performing Shakespeare varied widely: Alexis Denisof (who plays Benedick, the male lead) had worked with Mark Rylance at the Royal Shakespeare Company, while Jillian Morgese (who plays Hero, the female second lead) first came to Whedon’s attention while running away from an explosion as an extra on the set of The Avengers.* This combination of let’s-put-on-a-show camaraderie and differing levels of classical training could easily have made this feel like a smug vanity project: not every dinner-party experiment among friends is something that needs to be filmed and distributed. But if you were approaching the Whedonization of Shakespeare with trepidation, go ahead and convert all your songs of woe into hey-nonny-nonny, because this Much Ado About Nothing—while perhaps not an adaptation for the ages in every respect—is as bracingly effervescent as picnic champagne.