Watch out: There’s a hot new couple in town! Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake are so irresistible in “Much Ado About Nothing” that they would make the most embittered divorced believe in love all over again.
The pair bring piercing intelligence and winning charm to the play’s leads. The downside is that the energy in Arin Arbus’ production for Theater for a New Audience flags every time the stars aren’t onstage.
Things don’t augur well for the bickering Beatrice (Siff, best known as Dr. Tara Knowles on “Sons of Anarchy”) and Benedick (Cake, Broadway’s “Medea”). They’re engaged in “a kind of merry war,” says Beatrice’s uncle, Leonato (Robert Langdon Lloyd), “a skirmish of wit.”
Yet these two share more than they think. They’re both pleased with their own sharp tongues, and are convinced they’re above affairs of the heart.
“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me,” Beatrice tells Benedick, echoing his professed conviction.
According to the Great Laws of Romantic Comedy — which “Much Ado About Nothing” essentially wrote up back in the late 16th century — this can mean only one thing: Beatrice and Benedick are fated to fall in love.
OK, so they do have to be tricked by their friends to realize that, but the payoff is all the sweeter . It’s just great fun to watch Cake’s manly officer turn into a befuddled, lovestruck puppy, and Siff’s headstrong Beatrice melt into a puddle of happy goo — she had delivered similar nimble turns in “The Taming of the Shrew” last year.
The show, set in pre-WWI Sicily, complete with wandering accordion player, isn’t quite as nice to the second set of lovers. As with Beatrice and Benedick, the relationship between Hero (Michelle Beck) and Claudio (Matthew Amendt) is influenced by gossip and eavesdropping. In their case, though, the consequences are tragic.
Like many Shakespearean men, Claudio is quick to question his betrothed’s purity, and he cruelly humiliates her in public. Then, as so often happens, he gets the second chance he really doesn’t deserve.
Beck and Amendt handle their scenes well enough, but you can’t help counting the minutes until Benedick and Beatrice return. When these two equally matched opponents discover they are equally matched lovers, the theater radiates with joy.