I first saw Much Ado About Nothing in a castle courtyard in Oxford in 2008, and again this past July in Staunton, Virginia. Tonight's OSF show was the grandest production of Much Ado I've seen staged, and appropriately so for the open-air Elizabethan Stage here in Ashland. At first I didn't quite buy this particular Benedick--he seemed outmatched by the very impressive Beatrice--but I was won over by this particular pair by halfway through. The play was set in Sicily in 1945, which made the witty interplay between the two seem like it was lifted from a Hepburn/Tracy screwball comedy.
