Love's Labour's Lost Part 2 - Branaugh

Ever wonder what it would have been like if, instead of writing for the London stage in the late 1500s/early 1600s, Shakespeare had been writing musicals in the 1930s? Me neither. But one man has chosen to answer this question: Kenneth Branaugh.

Usually Branaugh’s approach to Shakespeare (and yes, I’ll get to his Henry V and Hamlet in due course) is fairly conventional. He’s just not a big risk-taker. So it’s a bit of a surprise that he would take the leap to make a Shakespeare Musical. And he mostly hired the right cast: Alicia Silverstone makes a great princess, Richard Briars has to be in all Branaugh’s Shakespeare movies (I think there’s a contract or something), and if you’re doing a musical, you want to hire Nathan Lane. Lane would make an awesome Don Adriano, but that role inexplicably went to Timothy Spall, who you’ll recognize as Peter Pettigrew from the Harry Potter movies. Nathan Lane ends up playing Costard, who is morphed from a country bumpkin (probably what Shakespeare meant by “clown”) to an obnoxious travelling vaudevillian.

Here are some quick notes I made while I was watching this:

• Branaugh is getting a little long in the tooth to play a romantic lead.
• Alicia Silverstone has an amazingly expressive face, and appears to understand what she’s saying (not a given in Shakespeare movies!).
• Dear Mr. Spall: TURN IT DOWN!
• Cut the “I Get a Kick Out of You” number.
• Cut the synchronized swimming number.
• Richard Clifford is a great Boyet. Give us more Boyet!
• It would be interesting to see what Baz Lurhman would have done with this.

If I had seen this in the theater, I would have been disappointed by the absence of The Pagent of the Nine Worthies scene. Since that’s usually the best part of the play, I’m glad they included it in the bonus features. This cast actually didn’t do this scene very well, so I understand why most of it was cut, but I would rather they had reshot it with some better ideas. This might be all the proof you need that comedy is actually harder than tragedy.

It’s one of Shakespeare’s comedies: It’s not that good to begin with, so while you could make it awesome, you can’t really ruin it.