Whedon and Shakespeare - The Best Thing Ever, or Pizza-flavored Ice Cream?

Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker as
Wesley and Fred Benedick and Beatrice.
via Entertainment Weekly

By now I'm sure most of the people grabbed by that headline have already been here. If not, I'll wait...

...Now I'll give you a moment to recover...

...Kay, better now? On we go. Let's talk about what this means. Click through for that.




Late last night, via numerous tweets from the likes of Alyson Hannigan, Sean Maher, and Nathan Fillion, news broke that Joss Whedon was working on had finished filming an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Since the announcement coincided with filming complete, and since the cast resembled a Whedon fan's wet dream (Wesley and Fred as Benedick and Beatrice?! Captain Hammer as Dogberry?!), half the internet immediately thought it was a hoax, unsurprisingly. After all, to get so excited about this, and have it not be real? That would be more than a fanboy's heart could stand.

But then, this morning, there was a press release. And then there was a feature in Entertainment Weekly. With Pictures. The tweets became more frequent. The project, shot in secret over a mere 12 days and under a gag order, is real. We may "fear no more", as the Bard would say.

All we have to worry about now is whether the movie will actually be as good as it is in our heads, and not as haphazard as it seems to a non-fan.

It's easy to ride your opinion of this project in either direction. On the pro side, Whedon is an astonishingly literate writer, peppering his scripts with highbrow references, all in the service of mature story lines filled with crackling dialogue. His material demands great acting, and more often than that he gets it from his troupe, many of whom are joining this project. There is a certain resemblance between his trademark banter and that of a Shakespearean comedy like Much Ado. It also helps that, as I learned in the EW article, Much Ado is atypically dense in prose, vs. the typical pentameter that is the trademark of his plays. Also in that interview, Whedon shares his take on the story, summing it up as the triumph of mature, real love, out of the grips of the over-idealized version sold to us.

After indulging the pros of the project so much, it's hard to imagine the cons, much less indulge them. The very simple fact is that we don't know what his grasp on the material is. He is a talented writer and director of contemporary television, his actors also quite good, but classical theatre is very much its own beast with two backs. It is densely packed, specialized writing, hard to imagine being done incredibly well with only a week's preparation for filming. True, several of the actors have classical training, and many of the others have participated in Whedon's readings. And yes, Whedon's writing style belies an understanding of rich characterization, revelation through dialogue, and allusions that Shakespeare would be making...

...Ah, dammit, there I go again headed in the positive direction again. I'm an optimist by nature, but even still, it's hard to doubt this thing. On the surface, sure, it seems like some literary nerd's slash-fiction, but the details really do seem to add up.

So have faith, and sigh no more, ladies. Or, I guess in Whedon-speak, that would be, "Hey, enough with the sigh-age, ok ladies?"