Once more unto the park! Much Ado About Nothing celebrates the homecoming of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a review

A sweet, long-awaited reunion is happening in Hawrelak Park. And you should be there to feel the vibrations.

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It’s been a hard, uphill road back, but the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a ‘merry wanderer’ (as a sprite in one of the Bard’s comedies self-identifies) since 2019, is finally home. At last. Back in the park where Freewill belongs, newly reno-ed after the city’s punishing three-year (!) closure.

And it’s with Much Ado About Nothing, a mid-period romantic comedy produced multiple times by Freewill in their 36-year history. It’s a challenging combination of merry and spirited, witty and delightful — with a dark and difficult knot at the centre that in the end gets untied, and somehow has to be reworked into a festive bow.

The Shakespeare is the first of two productions (one after the other, not alternating in rep) this summer. In a first for the cash-strapped festival, the other, opening July 1, is the Shakespeare-savvy Broadway musical comedy hit Something Rotten, produced by the Edmonton Pops Orchestra and Shelley’s Dance company, presented by Freewill and directed by Freewill artistic director Dave Horak.

With its teasing title, Much Ado About Nothing has been a Freewill return-to-action ticket before now. A farcically high-speed 75-minute Horak adaptation returned a real live cast of five to stages (in backyards and at the Fringe) in 2021 to celebrate the end of the COVID Zoom period. This time, on the big Heritage Amphitheatre stage, the 10-actor production directed by Ian Leung, a Freewill actor himself, steps up both to the hilarity of Much Ado and confronts its dark discomfiting side too, en route to the resolution dance at the end.

Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

It’s a high-spirited play, and a weird one. Two pairs of lovers (one a case of romantic reluctance, one a case of love at first sight), the duping of both by comic vs sinister eavesdropping, a wedding that turns into a funeral and back again, a malevolent scheme unravelled by the unlikeliest characters in the play, a team of bumbling dimwit Keystone cops who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery (or a bag of popcorn at a summer festival).

The look of Leung’s production, including Ami Farrow’s set and costumes and the sound (uncredited in the program and sometimes played by the actors), is vaguely Italian. The set, a monumental two-storey house facade, with symmetrical doorways and windows, isn’t exactly atmospheric, especially in a park with real foliage. But it works in a play in which concealment figures prominently. .

Director Leung’s edit of the text and his all-star actors locate the comic epicentre of Much Ado in the verbal jousting of the repertoire’s wittiest sparring partners, Benedick and Beatrice, both smart, both with the gift of the gab. Jesse Gervais and Vanessa Sabourin are splendid, and a contrast. Their volatile chemistry, based on fencing with words, will make you laugh.

The former, a gifted physical comedian, is a wry, charming Benedick, very funny, quick both on the uptake and the double-take, rueful when suave gets outfaced, always on the outlook for allies in the audience. Sabourin’s fierce, starchy Beatrice, equally quick-witted, is highly charm-resistant, with a wicked smile, and a withering way with deadpan.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, John Ullyatt, Troy O’Donnell in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

The matching scenes in which their affectionate friends set about bringing them together by planting clues designed to be overheard — how much Beatrice secretly pines for Benedick, and the reverse — are amusingly staged. They have the pair, and the conspirators, dodging behind the frankly fake shrubbery, hiding under tables, behind the pillars of Leonato’s house. Especially inspired are Benedick’s contortionist concealments and near-misses behind a bonsai tree in a succession of second-floor windows. 

Jen Fong and Rochelle Laplante, Vanessa Sabourin below, in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

When moved to fury, when her cousin Hero (Rochelle Laplante) is falsely accused of unfaithfulness by Claudio (Braydon Dowler-Coltman), the groom-to-be, Beatrice really lets ‘er rip. That’s when the squirrel, one of Freewill’s corps of support players who’d been eyeing wistfully my companion’s popcorn, gave that quest up and returned his attention to the stage.

The production opens with dancers in two-faced masks, slapping each other away (choreographer: Marie Nychka). Which cuts to the chase in a play that unfolds in a series of betrayals, and rejections resolved.

Leung faces up squarely, without flinching or camouflage, to the perpetual challenge of Much Ado. The ugly hoax played by the villain Don John (Ron Pederson) on Hero and Claudio is made exponentially uglier by the latter’s instant rejection of his beloved, and the sheer cruelty of waiting till the wedding to denounce her publicly. The older generation, the hitherto genial senior Don Pedro (John Ullyatt) and even her doting father (Troy O’Donnell), join in too, shockingly fast.

So Claudio as a romantic hero who gets the girl is a tricky assignment for the actor who plays him. And in a smart performance Dowler-Coltman creates an appealing character who’s on edge, not quite put back together post-war. Claudio’s hair-trigger temper, and his rebounds between good cheer and anger, are symptomatic. A champagne cork pops, and Claudio hears gunfire.

Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

Hero has a graceful gravity in Laplante’s performance. She’s incredulous, but persists. I must admit I really don’t get the funeral scene with dancing and chanting by dark-clad figures. But Leung has added a strange, tiny but telling, moment when Hero lingers thoughtfully over her own fake tombstone. Forgiveness may be mysterious, I guess, but it has a price that the production takes the trouble to recognize.

Pederson has the unusual double-assignment of Don John, a sort of prototype Iago, and Dogberry, the nitwit head of the local constabulary. The former doesn’t display the energetic unmotivated malice, much less glee, you usually see in the Much Ado bad guy who declares “I cannot hide what I am; I am a plain-dealing villain.” Far from it. In Pederson’s unsmiling performance he seems entirely grim, terminally depressed (in a sequel he’d be in therapy). Being bad doesn’t make him happy much less gleeful; he’s always turning his back on the party, “sadness without limit” triggered by signs of revelry.

Pederson’s Dogberry is a riot. In a premium comic performance with a line in pratfalls, he’s an officious, spectacularly clueless, bureaucrat in a white shirt, a tie that keeps getting caught in his glasses, pants pulled up too high as he attempts to preside, and curry favour. His weapon is a clipboard, and a self-important scattergun way with words he misuses hilariously. Dogberry’s ancient associate Verges, a quavery enforcer played by Nadien Chu, teeters across the stage precariously, bent over like a paper clip. That this is the team that holds the key to law and order and the happy ending is preposterous, oddball, and fun, a veritable physical comedy seminar in much ado about little.

Much Ado is a romantic comedy with some impressive obstacles en route to the comic resolution. And taking a hint from that —  converting all your “sounds of woe into hey nonny nonny,” as the song goes, Leung’s smart production with its deluxe, veteran cast, is a welcome home for Freewill after the trials and tribulations of the last seven years. It’s a matter for celebration. Get your popcorn, grab a drink, plant yourself in new seats (with cup holders!) that get you up closer to the actors than before.

On Friday night, before the ‘hey ho the wind and the rain’ of the weekend, Mother Nature stepped up with a hint of a sunset for the finale dance. That’s what we remember from our summer Shakespeare. And it felt just right.

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Directed by: Ian Leung

Starring: Jesse Gervais, Vanessa Sabourin, Rochelle Laplante, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Ron Pederso, Nadien Chu, Jen Fong, Richard Lee Hsi, Troy O’Donnell, John Ullyatt

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: through June 28

Tickets and full festival schedule: freewillshakespeare.com