Stage Review - Much Ado About Nothing (Noveltease Theatre)

Stage Review - Much Ado About Nothing
Presented By: Noveltease Theatre, Jo Jo Stiletto & Theatre Off Jackson - Seattle, WA
Show Run: September 10 - September 26, 2026
Date Reviewed: September 24, 2026
Run Time: 2 Hours, 15 Minutes (inclusive of a 15-minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Sameer Arshad

Let me tell you about the narrative burlesque format. Let me tell you about what Noveltease Theatre has been expertly accomplishing in Seattle. Take a beloved work of literature. Analyze it deeply. Adapt it for the stage. And have every character eventually have a moment where they bare some skin to some amazing music. And have it all fit in an engaging narrative, with plot and storyline and an overarching theme that actually makes vital social commentary to our modern times.

Visionary playwright Jo Jo Stiletto has brought to us an electrifying adaptation of this famous Shakespeare play, first published in the year 1600, which was known as a "Battle of the Sexes" play, due to the witty duels between the leading enemies-to-lovers couple, Benedick and Beatrice, and also the gendered sociological abuse that plays out between the featured couple, Claudio and Hero.

Instead of the original setting of Messina, Italy, we are brought into Messy Ina's, a 1970s fictional Seattle LGBT all-night disco club, lovingly referencing the legendary real-life Seattle venue of Shelly's Leg, that was the go-to location for queer culture, LGBT activism and non-stop dance music during the 1970s.

Messy Ina's is a sanctuary where Leo's drag-daughter Hero falls in love with Claudio, while Leo's niece, Beatrice, enjoys her exhilarating mic battles with Benny Dick, preserving the duels of verbal scorn from the original work. This trading of insults is delivered with high queer camp, inviting all the ooohhs and hisses from onlookers and the audience. It's delicious to watch. Dawn conspires to trick the rivals into confessing their feelings, while Joanne plots to destroy the other couple's happiness. When Claudio publicly rejects Hero on their wedding day, the resolution comes through community accountability. Leo offers Claudio a chance to make amends to everyone through performance, in a movement cheekily titled "Claudio's Submission."

Miss Elaine Yes queens over the proceedings with loving command as the presiding club owner Leo Nada, in a very deep and thoughtful performance: we do not want to mess with such a protective matriarch, but we also want to please her all the same because of how sweet she is. Elaine slices the room in half as she passionately demonstrates Leo's grief and fury when her drag daughter is humiliated, in a performance that becomes the emotional hinge of the second act.

Onyx Asili gives us a charismatic, mischievous Dawn Pedro, the activist leader who comes home from the barricades and immediately starts organizing a romance between the young folks. When Onyx Asili takes the stage, we understand exactly why this community would follow her Dawn Pedro into a protest or onto a dance floor. There is this rousing sense of hope and victoriousness from her presence: like everything is not only going to be okay, but also fabulous. Dawn Pedro will not just help you survive, she will help you thrive, into the sparkling firecracker you deserve to become. This kind of performance is a chain-reaction. Onyx bounces energy to us, to other actors, to the hot pink surfaces of the bar, to the space between it all. When she's on stage, there is nothing else you want to pay attention to.

At the heart of it all, Sailor St. Claire is fiery, magnetic and divine as Beatrice, the dazzling femmecee, slaying the room with wit that is precise and devastating. Yet there is immensely intricate layering and satisfyingly complex nuance in this performance, as St. Claire craftily lays bare Beatrice's interiority, her morals, her ethics, her goals and her protective spirit towards her drag-cousin Hero and her community at large. We understand where her zeal and passion are coming from. St. Claire gives us the "ride-or-die" Beatrice who will fiercely fight injustice and also take zero shit from anyone.

Opposite her, Harvey Gent delivers to us a delightfully campy, audience-complicit, uproarious performance as the swaggering drag king Benny Dick, a confirmed bachelor whose bravado is its own kind of costume, that everyone enjoys seeing come off (pun intended). Gent gives us an analytical slow-destruction of the character as they reconsider bachelorhood, reconsider who their friends really are and discover that the performance of not caring was something that they should have never ever taken on. Gent has dug deep into the source of this character to show us that a life without caring is its own closet.

Apollo Vídra plays Leo's drag-daughter Hero with tender radiance, while also showing a freaky fun-loving flirtatious streak. There's an authenticity and sincerity to what Apollo brings to her. Apollo gets us falling in love with her ourselves, and we're rooting for her to get her man, rooting for her when she's publicly shamed and rooting for her in the middle of her Roberta-Flack-powered melodrama. All of it makes her plight genuinely painful to witness. We are on her side and we want her to be made whole by the end.

Fosse Jack pulls triple duty as co-artistic director, co-choreographer and Claudio, skillfully charting the character's fall from lovestruck suitor to campy self-righteous accuser and back to penitent. But seriously, can we talk about this Claudio in detail? Can we talk about how Fosse fantastically delivers us a fascinatingly heightened submissive-leatherboy take on this character? A wild redemption arc that ends in a very physically challenging moment on stage that I will not spoil for you. It's an incredibly awe-inspiring performance towards the end and I've never seen anything like it on stage in Seattle.

Lulu La Lune is a gloriously wicked Joanne, and her performance makes it actually pleasurable to hate her, even while she teases and titillates the audience in her wickedness. She's so evil but she's also so alluring. We're always monitoring her, trying to guess what she will play at next.

Al Lykya gives us a very intriguing performance as the mysteriously sexy, compellingly slippery Borachio, the bartender who is an accomplice to Joanne's wickedness. He's relentlessly irresistible, he's always up to no good and he's such a goddamned brat that you want to discipline, but he'll never give you that satisfaction.

Ramona Rhapsody plays Margaret, the resident costume designer for the club's performances, bringing a playful, shy, endearing charm to her character that eventually transforms into a strong-willed embodied confident force-of-nature towards the end of her arc. I was very pleased with how Ramona took this character from background to foreground to full glorious realization, mostly through movement, reveals, teases and choreography. This is the kind of storytelling that narrative-burlesque as a genre is built for and Ramona is showing us exactly how it is done.

Anya Knees is a comic highlight (in multiple accents!) as Dogberry, the club janitor with strange fantastical powers of observation through custodial sentient minion constructs, earning laughs and gasps (because we're struggling for breath between laughs), even as she strips down to extract a confession out of the guilty handcuffed Borachio.

Valentine Nightly brings sly energy, sassy vivaciousness and infectious joy through the character of Conrad. Kir Royale gives us a wonderfully whimsical Ursula who pumps up the room with cheer and elan. I noticed that they were understudying three principal roles each while also being backup dancers (and what glorious dancing it was) and being stage-kittens on top of regular character responsibilities. This is a very difficult lift, and these artists deserve real appreciation for it.

There are several strokes of masterwork conducted by director Verity Germaine and her designers, with several excellent choices spread throughout the two acts. From the gorgeously vibrant set design of Robin Macartney to the superbly effervescent radiances emerging from each character, brought to us by lighting designer Angelo Domitri. I felt immensely blessed by the proudly evocative and elegantly defiant period-specific choreography from Flossy Beatrice and Fosse Jack. The exquisitely crafted 70s-era costumes from Lady Drew Blood are breath-taking. This is a serious accomplishment since there are regular scene costumes for all 12 characters as well as modular pieces that need to come off for each of their burlesque performances. There are also on-stage outfit reveals during several drag numbers across the night. I am very impressed by the sheer enterprise of the costuming ambition of this show, with stage managers and stage-kittens efficiently managing the flow of costume pieces and changes on and off the stage. Big props to Ronda Bordeaux, Angelo Domitri and Peter King on making sure this ship runs properly night-after-night with hundreds of moving pieces flowing perfectly on time.

It all comes together to present a glorious marathon of glamor, camp, comedy, social-commentary and depictions of queer joy, even in the middle of strife and a difficult struggle for human rights, transporting us to an era where being queer had to be as bold a statement as you could possibly muster.

This is the kind of adrenaline we really need in 2026, especially now that a section of the American LGBT community has been writing articles about wanting to stop identifying as "queer."

We don't need that kind of nonsense. What we need are shows like this instead.

By depicting a time and place where the queer community was knocking down sodomy-laws and instilling early workplace discrimination protections in the city of Seattle even back in the 1970s, this show becomes a love-letter to the queer elders who walked so that we could run.

Jo Jo Stiletto and Verity Germaine have shown a lot of thought-leadership in conceiving this very intelligently crafted show. They are demonstrating how extravagant parody can be wielded as a tool of social critique. They are not only critiquing hegemonic structures of oppression but also critiquing internal social problems in queer culture, particularly character-assassination, unjustified-cancelling, false rumors and toxic gossip. This is a show that examines the harms that can happen among people who are supposed to be allied to each other, while also exploring exciting angles of reformative justice as well.

Adapting Shakespearean works into new genres and settings is no easy task, especially when it comes to keeping the verse legible and the pacing brisk while leaving room for the cast's own jokes and bits to breathe. And we also know that the Shakespearean stage started as a drag stage. Men playing every role, including female ones. Gender and sexuality existing beyond a binary, as an actual performance. Pairing it with 1970s drag culture gives us a use for camp that is critical and philosophically generative. Philip Core said that "Camp is a lie that tells the truth," and this show embraces that philosophy in a way that is wide-ranging and inspirational.

The narrative-burlesque format (yes, now you know about the format) allows you to serve every physical reveal as its own line of text and every tease as a new piece of subtext. The dance numbers do real narrative work and help us delve into who these characters are and what they want.

Underneath the sequins and stage names, this Much Ado makes a quietly urgent argument about the spaces we build to survive. It reminds us that the people who fight hardest out in the world need somewhere to come home to, and that a community's real test lies in how it repairs the harm done within its own walls. As Jo Jo Stiletto writes in the program, "let's always remember that we are the only love gods."

Much Ado About Nothing, from Noveltease Theatre, Jo Jo Stiletto and Theatre Off Jackson, runs on stage through September 26 at Theatre Off Jackson in Seattle's Chinatown-International District. The production is recommended for audiences 18+, with content notes for alcohol, cigarette and drug use, light BDSM, insult comedy and, per the program, muppet show shenanigans. For more information, visit https://novelteasetheatre.org/.

Photo credit: Colin Madison