Beatrice and Benedick may not be William Shakespeare’s most famous romantic pair, but in waging their “merry war” of wits and words and insults in “Much Ado About Nothing,” they may be the Bard’s most fun duo.
Old Globe Artistic Director Barry Edelstein believes the much-loved comedy “generates an almost super-human amount of joy. It’s engineered to produce delight and fun and romance.”
Barry Edelstein, artistic director of The Old Globe, photographed at the San Diego theater’s outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre in 2023. He is directing Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” there this month. (Eduardo Contreras / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Edelstein is directing “Much Ado,” which winds up the Globe’s Summer Shakespeare season outdoors in the open-air Lowell Davies Festival Theatre. “We know that there are in the business what we call the ‘Golden 10,’” he said. “The 10 Shakespeare plays that are very, very popular. We find that we’re coming back around to these plays about every decade.”
The Globe last staged “Much Ado About Nothing” in 2018 and before that in 2003.
“I have found working on it this time a new explanation” for its popularity, Edelstein said. “It has a really unique capacity to create giddiness.”
Giddiness and wit, as when Benedick says to Beatrice “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.”
“There’s this clear attempt by Shakespeare in this turn-of-the-century moment (the play was written between 1598 and 1599) to really delve into the question of wit and what makes language witty onstage,” said Edelstein. “You feel he’s writing what appears to be a generic love story between these two people (the young couple Hero and Claudio), but then Beatrice and Benedick come into the play. They’re the subplot but they completely dominate because he so enjoys writing their remarkably idiosyncratic ways of speaking.”
Also characteristic of “Much Ado About Nothing” are the musical cues Shakespeare employed in his storytelling — metaphorically, to propel forward narrative points and to provide atmosphere. Best known is “Sigh No More, My Ladies” sung by Balthasar, a musician who attends to Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon.
“Musical theater and the Shakespearean theater have a lot in common,” said Edelstein, “which has to do with the musicality of Shakespeare’s language and with the emotionality of the plays.”
For this production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” he said, “I knew I needed musical theater artists.”
Tally Sessions, left, and Eden Espinosa co-star as the headstrong Benedick and Beatrice in The Old Globe’s summer production of “Much Ado About Nothing.” (Rich Soublet II)
Enter Eden Espinosa and Tally Sessions as Edelstein’s love-me/love-me-not Beatrice and Benedick.
“Eden was telling me she was looking for something really challenging,” Edelstein recalled. “She and Tally have worked together at the Globe twice (‘Rain’ in 2016, ‘The Gardens of Anuncia’ in 2021). They came because of an instinct I had to liberate the musical comedy energies in Shakespeare’s play.
“There’s nothing more fun than working with your good friends,” he said.
Espinosa was most recently onstage locally in the title role of La Jolla Playhouse’s musical “Lempicka” in 2024 (a role for which she later earned a Tony Award nomination after the show moved to Broadway). She’s worked with Sessions four times and has been friends with her fellow actor for over a decade.
“That makes it easier to be really vulnerable,” Espinosa said. “It’s the greatest gift of working with someone you trust.”
The friendship also is an asset in bringing to life their characters in “Much Ado.”
“The dynamic, that electric back and forth, that electric intellect, the battle of wits is very accessible because that’s how we (she and Sessions) are as friends,” she said. “We are completely safe in each other’s sandbox, and that’s rarer than you think it is.”
Sessions cites an “emotional shorthand” onstage with Espinosa.
“I’m getting to work with my friend who I’ve had four incredible artistic experiences with,” he said. “She’s such an extraordinarily gifted actor that you have to respond.”
“Much Ado About Nothing” marks Sessions’ return to the Old Globe two years after playing two roles in the ambitious “Henry 6,” a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” plays by Edelstein, who also directed. Sessions portrayed the general Lord Talbot in Part One (“Flowers and France”) and rebel Jack Cade in Part Two (“Riot and Reckoning”).
“I feel like a student again in the best way,” said Sessions, who’s performed on Broadway in musicals including “Company,” “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical” and “Falsettos.” “I’d studied in school but had not done Shakespeare in a couple of decades when I did ‘Henry 6.’ Barry explained even then that his opinion is that actors who have musical capability understand the ‘music’ of Shakespeare.”
Espinosa is making her Shakespearean debut in this Globe production of “Much Ado About Nothing.”
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done mentally,” she said. “But I said that about my last one. I feel like I’m always saying that about the project I’m working on. This is a completely different beast because you’re speaking what feels like a foreign language. If you’ve never swum in those waters before it’s daunting.
“But this is an amazing group of creatives and I feel so supportive and safe,” she said.
The play’s creative team includes choreographer Patrick McCollum, voice and text coach Jesse Perez and production stage manager Jess Slocum, who both Espinosa and Talley credit for support.
“I didn’t want to be an inexperienced Shakespearean actor and just be reciting the text,” said Espinosa. “I want to embody it and bring it to life in a way that only I can.
“For me because I’ve also never seen (‘Much Ado About Nothing’) I don’t know these characters as so many people do, so I don’t know how Beatrice is supposed to be,” she said. “That is helpful at times, but then there are other times when we’re talking about a scene and I don’t know that part yet.”
Espinosa credits her director with showing her the way.
“What’s awesome about Barry’s vision about putting Beatrice and Benedick in their 40s is there’s so much stigma of like ‘You’re still single?’ It’s a thing with both men and women. ‘What’s wrong with you? Why haven’t you found anyone?’ There is that dance of independence but also grief that ‘It’s happening for everybody who’s younger than I am, but I’m not going to lower my standards.’”
Also with the help of Edelstein and through working with Espinosa, Sessions said he is discovering the essence of the Beatrice/Benedick dynamic.
“These are people who have lived a life, they gave it a go and it didn’t end well,” Sessions said. “But there is something magnetic. As much as this person pisses you off, she charges you intellectually. There’s an almost inarticulable connection. You’re just drawn to one another.”
Sessions recalled Edelstein describing Benedick to him as “a sexy goober.”
“The deep core of him,” Sessions said of the character, “is ‘I just don’t want to get hurt again.’ That’s where all the witticisms at her expense come from. Loving someone is giving them permission to hurt you. That’s what he’s afraid of, and at the same time it’s like ‘I can’t be with anyone but you.’ Benedick has to learn ‘Hey, dummy. See what’s actually going on here. Get out of your own way. See what this woman is enduring right now and try to be there for her.’”
To Espinosa the appeal and the relatability of the Beatrice/Benedick relationship resides in its “humanity.”
“Love comes in so many forms,” she said. “The human heart and what people are capable of, good and bad, is very multifaceted. Walking around with walls around your heart can inform everything that comes along in your life.”
Sessions says “Much Ado About Nothing” asserts that “relationships don’t necessarily have an end. The possibility exists to find that person who lights you up. Don’t give up on love. Keep yourself open and learn to love in a more mature way.”
‘Much Ado About Nothing’
When: Previews, tonight through Friday. Opens Saturday and runs through Aug. 30. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays
Where: Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $38 and up
Phone: 619-234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org