BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Artists have interpreted Shakespeare in thousands of crazy ways _ not just as written for folks in the Elizabethan era. PBS' "Great Performances" does them one better on Friday.
The cast from New York's Shakespeare in the Park will shape-shift onto television with a completely new version of "Much Ado About Nothing." The show will feature patriotic musical numbers and an all-black cast, and instead of setting the play in 1598 Sicily, it will take place in Cobb County, Ga., 2020.
"Kenny Leon, the director, came with such a strong vision of WHERE we were telling the story," explains Grantham Coleman, who plays the young Benedick.
"And with the cast that he chose, we all gave it our all to participate in the world that he came up with for us. And I think, it being a comedy, it lends itself to something that's not as hushed and quiet as a lot of Shakespeare's used to being seen."
Margaret Odette, who portrays the slandered Hero, thinks the show's unique.
"What excites me ... about our production being all black, and that so many people of all races and identities are going to get to see this across the country thanks to PBS, is that you are going to see the multiplicity of our community _ both how we look, how we express ourselves, the kinds of roles we can fill," she says.
"You are not just the hero in this story. You are the villain as well. You are the comedic relief ... I think it's a great gift to our country to remember that the black community is very diverse within the community and has many voices."
Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater in New York, presents the popular Shakespeare in the Park every summer. He explained the show's transformation.
"What you need to do when you work in plays is exactly what Kenny did on this, which is find a world that opens up the play, that doesn't lie on top of the play like some kind of application to it. And when Kenny and I were first talking about doing the show, he was not incredibly confident about his Shakespeare chops," Eustis recalls.
"He hadn't done a lot of it, and he had some anxiety. And what we kept talking about is, 'Kenny, this IS you. We've hired you to do your vision of this show, not to do somebody else's, but to do yours.' And I remember he said, 'Well, I think, then, they should all be black.' And I went, 'Fantastic,' not realizing at the time that we had never done an all-black Shakespeare in the Park, which kind of astounded me."
The comedy in "Much Ado" can be as broad as slipping on a banana peel. That's not unusual, says Eustis.
"It's important ... to remember that Shakespeare wrote for the most diverse audience that had been watching theater for 2,000 years _ since Athens. He was writing for the king, for the queen, for the aristocracy, for the Oxford and Cambridge graduates, AND for the illiterate groundlings who stood all day (to watch).
"And he had to write something that appealed to all of them at the same time. He was writing stuff that is as broad and funny as what we might think of as sitcoms ... But what he was saying is you can't separate that out from the most deep and most human and most powerful stuff. It's all on the same continuum."
Odette agrees.
"Sometimes it did feel like we were in a sitcom, because the comedy lent itself to that, and the performances lent itself to that," she says. "But other times it felt much more like a single-cam comedy. So I think that just speaks to the breadth of the skill of the artist to really bring so many different varieties of not just comedy but the tragic moments as well. And ... our audiences were just so generous and so with us the whole time."
The viewers who loved the show when it played the park also proved very diverse themselves, says Coleman.
"Because the tickets are free. So you have people who normally can't afford to see a Broadway show or can't afford to see any theater, going in to see these productions year after year after year. And I think what we kind of kept in mind is that if we're going to do this show, the most truthful way for us in the world that Kenny gave us and the text that Shakespeare wrote for us, it has to be something that's so honestly true to who we are as people and characters.
"If it comes across broadly, it's only because it's a broad, universal, human truth or human joke that we have, rather than this part's only going to be funny for black people. This part's only going to be funny for another race. I think that's part of the success of what we were able to pull off, which Shakespeare's been doing for a lot longer."
SIMMONS CROSSES '21 BRIDGES'
The versatile J.K. Simmons _ who we see nightly hosting his Farmers Insurance gigs _ is costarring in the film "21 Bridges," opening Friday. The J.K. stands for Jonathan Kimball, he tells me. He says he kept changing his name because he always encountered someone with the same moniker.
Simmons says he didn't determine he wanted to be an actor until he'd been doing it for a time.
"Because as a kid I sort of enjoyed clowning around and getting a little attention but didn't do a lot of school plays or anything. It was studying music, which I was very serious about, and fully intended to be the next Brahms. I wanted to be a composer and singer, too," he says.
"I was doing some opera and musical theater and getting to blend my serious music side with my goof-around side doing musicals and things and gradually I started doing plays. Even when I started doing theater after college, I was making a living doing theater, but it never occurred to me that I'd end up in L.A. or New York doing television and film. I thought if I could do summer stock and pick up a job now and then to get me through the rest of the year, that would satisfy me. It was really about the joy I got from doing it. I don't want to get too artsy-fartsy, but (it was) the self-expression."
ACTORS RETURN TO ROLES 20 YEARS LATER
They may be a bit long in the tooth, but Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt return to their old roles as the happily married couple in "Mad About You" on the Sony Spectrum streamer Wednesday.
While that's not a mass audience, more and more actors are finding comforting niches on streaming sites on which to ply their wares. Reiser says it was never his intention to be an actor at all. "I wanted to be a comic. I never said I wanted to be an actor, but when you're young it all blows together onto the category of performing," he says.
"When I was a kid I didn't look up and say, 'I want to be on the big screen.' What I did was listen to comedy records. My idols were comics, they weren't actors. So I didn't really think in terms of that. And life takes you to unexpected places sometimes."
DOCUMENTARY CELEBRATES GARTH BROOKS
A&E will kick off a whole week of celebrating Garth Brooks with a four-hour documentary beginning on Sunday and winding up next Monday. The doc will feature interviews with cohorts like current wife Trisha Yearwood, and Keith Urban, George Strait and James Taylor, as well as chats with the man himself. The two-parter, "Garth Brooks: the Road I'm On," will chronicle his phenomenal rise as music's best-selling solo artist of all time and will cover his early days when he was playing gigs in college towns and struggling to gain a foothold in Nashville.
What makes this round-faced minstrel with roots are planted in rock so phenomenal is no big secret, he says.
"We're just following our heart," he says. "The one thing that everybody in this world has in common _ the only thing they have in common _ is that they have a heart. They might not speak the same language. They might not listen to the same music. But they've all got hearts."
Although the singer grew up in Yukon, Okla., the youngest son of vocalist Colleen Carroll, Brooks' major musical influences were his two older brothers. "We weren't allowed to date until we were like 16, so I went (to concerts) with my older brothers. And none of them went to country music shows," he says.
What he did see were the heavy rockers. "I had every Kiss album there was and went to the shows. And really what I saw when I went to the show was, hey, these guys aren't giving me my record or my album. They're giving me my whole money's worth. Because what I'm seeing here, I don't see on albums."
He learned from that lesson and made his live shows into extravaganzas.
