Santa Cruz Shakespeare the new company changed its name to Santa Cruz Shakespeare. "The New York Times" referred to the company's rebirth as an "underdog success story." For its inaugural season under its new arrangement, Santa Cruz Shakespeare presented "As You Like It", "The Merry Wives of Windsor", and "The Beard of Avon" in July and August 2014. All three shows were performed in the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen on UCSC's campus. For the 2015 season Mike Ryan took over sole Artistic Director duties and the company announced productions of "Much Ado About Nothing", "Macbeth", and David Ives's adaptation of Pierre Corneille's "The Liar".
Much Ado About Nothing the album is also a quotation from the play. The 2014 YouTube web series Nothing Much to Do is a modern retelling of the play, set in New Zealand. In 2015, Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the music for a rock opera adaptation of the play, "These Paper Bullets", which was written by Rolin Jones. In 2017, a YA adaptation was released by author Mckelle George called "Speak Easy, Speak Love", where the events of the play take place in the 1920s, focused around a failing speakeasy. In 2018, author Molly Booth released a summer YA novel adaptation called "Nothing Happened",