Danielle Brooks shines in a near-perfect<em> Much Ado About Nothing</em>: EW review

That is what Tony-winning director Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun) gives us in his modern Much Ado About Nothing at the Delacorte through June 23.Leon’s fleet and thoughtful telling takes place an affluent African-American community in Georgia in the spring of 2020: Peaches hang from the trees and Stacey Abrams campaign banners wave from Leonato’s brick manor house where the nobleman (played warmly by Broadway veteran Chuck Cooper) lives with his marriage-minded daughter Hero and his marriage-intolerant niece Beatrice.The play is framed by men coming from and leaving for war. The script doesn’t specify a historic battle, so Leon has armed his soldiers with only protest placards — “RESTORE DEMOCRACY NOW” among them — and before the action begins Danielle Brooks sings an a cappella version of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” But while the production references our dispiriting current political climate, the mood is generally joyous, the laughs plentiful, and the focus rightly on Shakespeare’s battle of the sexes, anchored by the haters-turned-lovers, Beatrice and Benedick.The sparring between Beatrice (Brooks, best known as Taystee on Orange is the New Black) and Benedick (Grantham Coleman, of the Public’s As You Like It) is electric from the start, the insults of their “merry war of wits” played like The Dozens.