Much Ado

About a Shrew

This one requires a complicated set up so I’ll get right to it. Bea (Ashley Williams) is a successful television director who has returned to her mother’s annual Shakespeare Festival to direct the last play staged for that summer, The Taming of the Shrew. Her mother tells her this is her last season heading the Festival which is the impetus for Bea (Bee-a) confessing that she has been wanting  to take over for her mother once she retired. They learn that not only does her contract to do that rest on whether her Taming of the Shrew turns out to be a critical and financial success, but that the continuation of the festival itself is at stake. Someone wants to buy it and the board is willing to sell it unless Bea can show she can successfully take over from her mother and insure its continued success.   Bea and company are not too worried because Bea is an experienced director and she has gotten a famous award winning television actress, Hannah Michaels, to play Kate. Hannah wants to boost her acting cred by doing Shakespeare on the stage and there has been a lot of publicity about it already. As for Bea’s love interest, to Bea’s dismay, the actor her mother has already hired to play Petruchio is well-known actor Benny Gersten (Niall Matter) with whom Bea had a romance 20 years ago while they were young actors playing Romeo and Juliet. Benny returns to the festival every year to recharge. It has been awhile since he and Bea have met but their relationship has always been rocky stemming not only from their break-up but their differing approaches to Shakespeare. They bicker a lot. Kind of like…well, you know. Before rehearsals begin, Benny tells Bea that he thinks it would be better for all concerned if he played a smaller role and let another actor, Clay, have the leading role. This seems to be because he can’t tolerate Bea’s non-traditional approach to Shakespeare but didn’t make a lot of sense. It did have the benefit of making the Kate/Petruchio pairing more age appropriate as Niall Matter is old enough to be Lindura’s (the actress playing Hannah/Kate’s) father. It also sets up the secondary romance between Clay and Hannah (Claudio and Hero).

I liked this one quite a lot. Hallmarks based on great works of literature always have a head start with me. And this features two of them! Niall Matter and Ashley Williams worked well together and their romantic pairing was believable and engaging. We get a lot of The Taming of the Shrew during Bea’s directing and rehearsals, and a bit of the contentious relationship between Kate and Petruchio is reflected in Benny and Bea. I appreciated that the modern troubles staging this play, which, after all, is based on domestic abuse, were addressed. Bea’s reading is not an unusual one, to get around the dilemma. As far as the play this movie is supposedly based on, Much Ado About Nothing, there are almost enough connections for it to be called a modern retelling. Barely. The names are similar (Bea/Beatrice and Benny/Benedict). Both couples relationship is contentious based on their history. Also, the company, recognizing that beneath their snarky banter, the two are actually a perfect match, trick them into believing that each are hiding romantic feelings for the other. This leads to a truce between the two which gives them room to develop a relationship. Also there was a masquerade ball. 

But I didn’t feel the connections between the Shakespeare play and this movie really shone through in this story. The tropes in “Much Ado” are now all too common and oft repeated. There were too many differences and it was kind of confused by the other Shakespeare play which was more a part of the story. Why couldn’t the play they were putting on be “Much Ado” and not “Taming”? There was too much other unrelated stuff going on, including Hannah’s surprising ineptness in her role. Though likable, she was kind of a flake. Was Hero a flake in the Shakespeare play? I’m afraid I don’t know. She is having trouble learning her lines and is more interested in flirting with Clay than focusing on the play. Bea is concerned because she sees her own experience playing Juliet to Benny’s Romeo 20 years prior. She had let her feelings for him override her focus on her role resulting in bad reviews which caused her to quit acting and focus on directing. And then we have the big crisis of Hannah quitting the play and running off when she finds out the whole future of the festival rests on her being a success as Kate. I mean, really? She is supposed to be a professional. The whole episode was dumb, including why she came back.  But despite the distractions, this was pretty entertaining thanks to the jam-packed plot and bright script. I should probably watch it again to look for more shout outs to “Much Ado.” I’m sure I must have missed some. I love the way “William Shakespeare” is credited as a writer of this movie on IMDb. The Bard can rest easy now.