From "Heated Rivalry" to Buffy and Spike, audiences love an enemies-to-lovers plot.
And Shakespeare might be one of the best to ever do it.
"You know, a lot of people say that ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is the original rom-com," said Barry Edelstein, artistic director of The Old Globe and an expert on Shakespeare.
"Much Ado About Nothing"
Aug. 2-30 | The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park | $44-$132 | MORE INFO
We follow the bickering Benedick and Beatrice as they resist their friends' matchmaking efforts. Their story is entangled in another romance between Beatrice's cousin Hero and Benedick's fellow soldier Claudio.
Edelstein said everybody in the play knows Beatrice and Benedick should be together. Everybody except the two of them.
"Spoiler alert, there's a big kiss at the end of the play. When they kiss, the audience goes bananas because we've been waiting all night for them to finally figure it out," Edelstein said.
Eden Espinosa, hailing from Broadway roles like Elphaba in "Wicked" and Tamara de Lempicka in the La Jolla Playhouse-grown "Lempicka," plays Beatrice in the Globe's production.
"I'm really falling in love with playing this woman, and I love her strength, her independence. She really speaks her mind when it comes to her opinions about how women are treated, how men treat women, and their places in society," Espinosa said.
The Globe's production is set in modern times and even has a karaoke subplot.
Edelstein said a contemporary staging actually mirrors the late 1500s, when Shakespeare's actors dressed in a way their audiences understood.
"When people are in modern clothes, you can see who's got money and who doesn't have money. You can see who's in the military and who's not in the military," Edelstein said. "There's just something about putting the play in our world now or something that's kind of based in our world that just makes it clearer and more immediate."
The use of music is a riotously funny and delightful plot device — but the actors' physical comedy is also well-suited to the absurdly executed eavesdropping scenes.
Those farcical eavesdropping moments are what ultimately soften the hearts of Beatrice and Benedick. It's proof that Shakespeare understood, centuries ago, not just how great an enemies-to-lovers plot can be, but also just how susceptible we are to what other people might be saying about us.
Directed by Edelstein, this production is the second half of the Globe's outdoor summer Shakespeare festival. It stars Espinosa as Beatrice, Tally Sessions as Benedick, Stephanie Hinck as Hero and Ainsley Melham as Claudio.
