Beatrice and Benedict (Feb. 2017)

Adapter / Director

Synopsis

At Messina High School, everyone is excited to attend the Valentine’s Day Dance and find out which girl will win the Sweetheart Crown at the basketball game that same night. Hero, one of the more popular and oppressive girls at the school, believes that she has laid out all of her cards correctly to ensure that she will win the crown.

However, Hero suspects that her victory might be spoiled by the antics between her sister Beatrice and her object of affection/derision, Benedict. Hero comes up with a plan to bring the two together, though the two outwardly feign interest in the other when pressed by their friends, Ursula, Claudio, and Peter. Unfortunately for Benedict, he is forced by his friends on the basketball team to wear a silly Cupid costume and present an arrow as a form of invitation to the dance. He presents the arrow to Beatrice, who is shocked and flees the scene. Moments later, the presentation of the crown takes place and to Hero’s horror, her put-upon friend Ursula was voted as the queen.

Outside, Beatrice gathers her thoughts and is able to admit her feelings towards Benedict. When he and their friends arrive, there is a moment of doubt that they will fall back into familiar ways. Benedict decides to admit his feelings for Beatrice, and they leave for the dance together along with everyone else.

Adapting French Opera Based on Shakespeare in America…

For Middle Schools?

Work on Beatrice and Benedict began during the summer of 2016, as I looked for shows that would be appropriate to produce for FSU's Opera Outreach tour for middle schoolers. Not surprisingly, this seems to be a noticeable audience segment for which composers haven't written much.

What attracted me to the piece were several factors: a fun, French score by Berlioz, a Shakespearian-based plot, and strong central characters that had a sense of humor. When I pitched this to my producer, I originally envisioned a hipster-style wedding weekend for Hero and Claudio that Beatrice and Benedict were ruining with their antics. He, instead, pushed me to make the piece more directly reflect the lives of middle/high schoolers in the production.

I began the adapting process once I knew what my scenario was. Due to the specificity of the location/period, I couldn't directly use much of the original libretto or Shakespeare’s play, either. I had to find ways of making clever adjustments to the plot and characters, while including occasional winks to the source materials. The soldiers became basketball players (with a Warrior logo), a wedding became a homecoming-like ceremony, and Berlioz’s contrived 'wine of Syracuse' had to go for obvious reasons.

One of the biggest changes I made to the characterization was changing Hero from the meek and innocent character that she is in the play and opera into a ego-maniacal control-freak as she appears in this production. By doing this, it helped provide the necessary antagonist and driving force needed to propel the events of the story, especially when there were only six characters in the adapted version rather than the more robust cast lists in the play or opera. One of the things I find most strange about Berlioz’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing is his elimination of the Don John character in the play by Shakespeare, who acts as the prototypical Iago stand-in we would later see in Othello. By giving Hero a more aggressive and controlling personality, it helped me as a writer and director create drama while still remaining mostly true to the focus of the source material, which to me was people having the freedom to admit how they feel and stand up when they are being treated poorly or unfairly.

The production received a fair amount of local coverage, including videos from a news station and the county school system, and an interview in the local paper.

Ultimately, this production was an important stepping stone for me. It was the first time I worked with Grant Preisser in a director/designer context, and the first instance working with double cast rehearsals. More importantly, it helped me share my belief in the necessity of kindness, truthfulness, and living without fear of judgment to an audience that has been frankly under-served by the genre of opera.