ABOUT FACE - Peter Filichia's Diary

Peter Filichia's Diary, www.TheaterMania.com

September 29, 2008 September Leftovers

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...for those who like character-driven songs from characters you can come to care about, comedy songs from actors who have a talent to amuse, and witty book writing, David Arthur and Jeffrey Lodin’s About Face is the show for you. Barbara Walsh and Mark Zimmerman are perfection in this update of Much Ado about Nothing, set at Whittney College, where she plays Beatrice Stanton, a humanities professor who hates sports, and he’s Bill Benedick, the football coach who has no use for book learning. What happens when both want that grant money to endow their programs? Walsh’s first song is the type you preparing to shower with applause 14 seconds after it begins, and newcomer Rebecca Weiner is a hey-look-out-world-here-I-come wonder in her big number. About Face does have one funny problem, easily solved: Beatrice mentions so many literary luminaries and classics that the irony should occur to her that she and her nemesis share the same names and much of the same antagonism that the main characters of Much Ado about Nothing have.