Wounds too fresh for panache

Re-reading March 11 NYT review of "Scottsboro Boys" came across the critic's bottom line for why the musical doesn't quite click, that the racial issues are still "too raw," too close, even though events date to 1930s...all that time past and wounds too fresh for "panache"—Realizing how self-indulgent my reflection here...I can see how the "Much Ado" chapter I'm stuck on brings me up short in the same way, though personally and most idiosyncratically—allowing (somehow choice comes into this) a kind of [Altan's Moll Dubh A'Ghleanna plays while I write this] contrived reluctance to leave the edges where they are—now thinking of my precious "immediate" audience especially Jack W who would be interested in the structural "factoids" as TF described them but also the work world the way it was for me back then and how it changed...TF, sitting in that Stinson place we rented, put me onto Bill Bryson's style of writing "what's in front of him" and later on dropping in those interesting factoids...how "Much Ado" is about so much spinning of wheels and the betrayal with too quick endorsement is my own somehow and poor theatre history, a beautiful woman told to hide her calloused hands, for surely she has worked hard and with every conceivable medium all these millennia...the set onstage in "M.A." becomes the book imagined, the book I cannot access because I have screened it out—cannot reach it, get to it, made it too precious, the elaborate construction overlaid on the original—wasn't that the root challenge of the RSC? Balancing interpretation w/the play's truth. I suppose the literati would say "presenting" that truth to this generation, the current mode, "making it accessible" and so on. Now it feels I'm really making a big deal out of nothing.