Much A-dude

By Linda Nelson
Executive Director of Opera House Arts

"Men should wear tights and tights only."

"It’s very masculine."

"It’s a very specific look."

These are comments overheard last Sunday afternoon during our first costume technical rehearsal for Much Ado About Nothing, which opened June 30 at the Stonington Opera House, and continues through July 16.

For the first time in Opera House Arts' history, we've set our Shakespeare in Stonington production in Elizabethan times and style: which means an (almost) all male cast, with men playing the female roles as well as men playing men -- in tights. Or, to steal a phrase from a cast member: Much a-dude!

It turns out Much Ado, known widely as Shakespeare's most beloved comedy, IS a real dude show. It depicts a male fraternity of soldiers with a lot of male bonding and prank-making afoot but it also fixates on female purity, asking: Really, c'mon guys--what IS that all about?!

"Nothing" (pronounced "noting" in Elizabethan times) was Elizabethan slang for "vagina." Such language and plot devices move Much Ado from mere frothy rom-com into more complex and interesting territories of gender and power.


In Elizabethan times men wore their power, well, on their crotch. Soldiers, much like today's athletes, found tights to be the most effective costume in which to exert themselves. Instead of jock straps, they favored a codpiece: a padded device which (not unlike bum rolls or, more currently, bras) shapes and enhances (or masquerades as) male anatomy for optimal public display.

Thus the men are quite visibly dudes in Much Ado, prancing and dancing, and wearing their semblances of power front and center and looking darn good doing it (or perhaps it's just a welcome breath of fresh air to see male sexuality objectified the way female sexuality perpetually is). This wasn't an avant-garde costuming choice. It's merely historically accurate. And yet in the end all, even the resistant lothario Benedick, are happily married -- moved out of their frat house and into a broader and more inclusive vision of community, a wondrous vision thanks to the extreme acts of magic and trickery required to bring it to life. In this as in all of his comedies, Shakespeare's optimism is ultimately front and center. A hopefulness, perhaps, that we can move beyond war and other obvious displays of sexual and political power to something less polarized. As Friar Francis instructs in his final proclamation: "Let wonder seem familiar."

Or as Benedick concludes: "Man is a giddy thing."

PHOTOS by Linda Nelson, Opera House Arts:
ABOVE: Tim Eliot as Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing
CENTER: Craid Baldwin as Ned/Beatrice and Thomas Piper as Edmund/Benedick in Elizabeth Rex, running in repertory with Much Ado About Nothing.