On Friday evening, I saw one of the best productions of
Much Ado About Nothing that I have seen anywhere. It was the first play on the summer schedule of the Virginia Shakespeare Festival here in Williamsburg. This is a summer theatre festival that has been running here on the campus of the College of William and Mary for 35 years now. The productions, which feature a mix of equity and non-equity actors from around the country, always have very high production values and are often very innovative in their approach to Shakespeare. Sometimes this innovative approach works better than others, but this year's
Much Ado was a show I would put right up there with the best theatre I have seen anywhere, including New York and London.
Sometimes I think that we tend to forget that there is wonderful theatre going on out there in places other than Broadway or the West End. So, having just seen a great example of this, I wanted to give a shout out to the VA Shakespeare Festival and the cast of
Much Ado for a first-rate evening of theatre, and to invite anyone else who has seen a great local/regional production lately to add to this thread.
