Essential Arts & Culture: Beyond the Broad

Adaptations of Shakespeare to a modern day setting -- or simply a time other than Elizabethan -- come fast and furious, some good, some less so. Theater critic Charles McNulty enjoyed the comic energy that writer Rolin Jones brings to “These Paper Bullets! A Modish Ripoff of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing” at the Geffen Playhouse. Set in London during the swinging ‘60s, "Bullets" features songs by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. It could use some pruning, McNulty says, and there's little emotional depth, but the show has a “tremendous fizziness.”