The Play's the Thing

Love's Labor's Lost, as performed down at BYU, was set up as a radio show during the war.  The question is, did this add to the theme of the play, or detract from it?  As the audience comes in to sit down, jazzy music is playing, periodically interrupted by war adds.  The play also ends with another add.  Throughout the play, there is almost constantly a jazzy background music.  This all adds to the atmosphere of a radio show.  But why would they choose this for the play?

In Shakespeare's day, there were no radios.  The fact that the King was British and the Princess was French was significant, because France and Britain were enemies for most of their history.  Their love symbolized a uniting of the countries for the time, and thus had political as well as personal meaning.  In the play at BYU, the French and the British were both on the same side during the war.  The fact that they fall in love does not have the same meaning as it did in the play Shakespeare wrote.  It looses some significant meaning in the new context.  Although it doesn't seem likely, it might have made more sense if the play occurred at the end of the war, and the Princess was from Germany, or one of the other countries on the other side.  Then their love would once again have symbolized the joining of two enemies happily, the opposite of what happened in Romeo and Juliet.