Back in the days when Kenneth Branagh was regarded as an art-house director he made a musical version of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. The play was set in the 1940s and blended musical numbers from the period with the rich Elizabethan love poetry. I’m not a fan of playing Shakespeare in settings significantly later than his own period, but here it worked. The Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin songs blended superbly with the Shakespearean verse, as did the pastiche of musical numbers in the style of the period. All of which tells us a lot about…