SHAW 2006, Part One:
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
By Ron Ehmke
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Melissa Peters as Dinah, Jay Turvey as Mike Connor,
and Patty Jamieson as Liz Imbrie in High Society. Shaw photos by David Cooper. |
The privileges and responsibilities associated with tremendous amounts of money are an explicit motif in all three offerings discussed in this issue, although each approaches the subject with a completely different tone. One is a musical set on an enormous estate on Long Island in the 1930s, one’s a comedy set in a palatial mansion in Bulgaria in the 1890s, and the third is a drama unfolding in a doctor’s lavishly appointed parkside residence in the downtown Manhattan of 1850. Love—complicated, messy, socially objectionable love—drives each show, but in every case, it’s all about the Benjamins, too.
High Society
(at the Festival Theatre through November 19)
Talk about adaptation: this 2006 production is a revival of Arthur Kopit’s 1997 Broadway reworking of Cole Porter’s 1956 movie musical based on George Cukor’s 1940 film version of Philip Barry’s 1939 stage play, The Philadelphia Story. Got all that? Hope so, because this convoluted lineage helps explain why the current manifestation feels so stiff. Anything that was organically fun about the original premise—young, free-spirited socialite Tracy Lord faces the eve of her second marriage hounded by her first husband and a tabloid news crew, while much screwball merriment ensues—now seems forced in Kopit’s script. Songs from other periods of Porter’s career are grafted in, provoking an annoying sense of time travel when characters supposedly living in the late thirties suddenly find themselves behaving like flappers (an anachronism as jarring as, say, a bunch of twenty-first century partygoers busting out the lambada or the macarena as if it’s the latest dance craze).
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Camilla Scott as Tracy Lord with the
ensemble in High Society. Shaw photos by David Cooper. |
The second bit of good news is that the Shaw’s production is about as good as anyone could manage from such a mediocre starting point. (To be clear, it’s the 1997 musical that’s so deeply flawed, not the sparkling source material.) Director Kelly Robinson has a gift for fluid staging, exemplified by one remarkably efficient musical number in which we’re given a thorough tour of the Lord residence using little more than a series of movable door frames and step units. He’s got a fine cast to work with; leads Camilla Scott, Dan Chameroy, and Jay Turvey have the thankless task of filling shoes forever associated with the likes of Kathryn Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Stewart, and Frank Sinatra, and they do so admirably. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out which shoes are which.) Scott’s role was unmistakably written for Hepburn, and at various points she seems to be channeling Kate the Great, but for the most part she makes it her own. Young Melissa Peters is a standout as Tracy’s precocious little sister; true, she’s a carbon copy of bespectacled Virginia Weidler from Cukor’s film, but her energy and intelligence make her irresistible.
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Mike Shara as Sergius in Arms
and the Man. Shaw photos by David Cooper. |
(at the Festival Theatre through October 29)
Festival artistic director Jackie Maxwell takes the reins for one of this year’s two Shaw scripts (we’ll consider the second, Too True to Be Good, next issue). This cherished comedy about a Swiss soldier (beautifully played by Patrick Galligan here) who stumbles into the clutches of a top-level Bulgarian military family zips along at a brisk pace (by festival standards, its two-hour-and-ten-minute running time is practically a one-act), and Maxwell plays it as broadly as humanly possible. We’re talking major-level slapstick here: extended pratfalls, running sight gags, the works.
Nowhere is this strategy clearer than in the over-the-top performance of Mike Shara as Major Sergius Saranoff, a pompous boob who’s nowhere near as competent on the battlefield as he thinks. To illustrate his narcissism, Maxwell has him produce … a gilded mirror! The rest of his blocking consists of striking one pseudo-heroic pose after another; it’s mildly amusing the first time, slightly embarrassing the second, and numbing on the fifteenth go-round.
This heavy-handed approach to Shaw’s nuanced script is an acquired taste, and journalistic integrity compels me to report that a significant percentage of my fellow audience members seemed to acquire it right away. The production is a crowd-pleaser, and I can’t say I wasn’t pleased myself; I simply grew weary of the underlining of each and every obvious joke.
That somewhat major objection aside, there is much to marvel at: another reliable cast, for instance, featuring longtime company members Diana Donnelly, Nora McLellan, Catherine McGregor, Peter Millard, and Peter Hutt. Then there’s Sue LePage’s Klimt-inspired stage design, with each of its three sets revealing more of this powerful family’s vanity. (Best of all is a book-free library, equipped with a much-discussed state-of-the-art “electric bell” for ringing the servants.) Appropriately enough for a show so concerned with satirizing the romanticization of men in uniform, William Schmuck’s period costumes are both elegant and evocative; the sight of McLellan as a matriarch draped in an opalescent beaded burgundy shawl says more about her character than any bit of exaggerated stage business possibly could.
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Tara Rosling as Catherine Sloper and
Donna Belleville as Aunt Penniman in The Heiress. Shaw photos by David Cooper. |
(at the Royal George through October7)
I’ve saved the best (of the present tiny sampling, that is) for last. Not that you’d guess this stage version of Henry James’s novella Washington Square was the pick of the crop, judging from the generally negative reviews the show received shortly after it opened.
Like Arms, this one is a matter of taste, and this time I was in the camp yelling “bravo!” Your ability to appreciate the Shaw’s take on The Heiress depends on your ability to tolerate two things: the script itself, and the highly mannered performance of Tara Rosling in the title role. I was able to overlook the stilted, exposition-filled dialogue of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s 1947 adaptation of a notoriously anti-theatrical author and savor the sheer brilliance with which James’s 1880 tale is constructed. The set-up is simple enough: widowed physician Austin Sloper (Michael Ball) watches with great disdain as his only offspring and the potential inheritor of his vast estate, painfully shy daughter Catherine (Rosling), is courted by a charming but penniless young man (Shara again, this time in a far more understated mode).
But that high-concept paraphrase merely hints at what James does with it. Does the suitor truly love Catherine for her (evidently well-disguised) finer qualities, or is he really the money-hungry “mercenary” he loudly claims not to be? Before we find out for sure, each of the major players, including the good doctor and his sister (Donna Bellevue), evolves into a psychologically complex character, neither fully angelic nor outright demonic.
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Michael Ball as Doctor Sloper and Tara Rosling.
Shaw photos by David Cooper. |
As he did in last season’s production of the World War I drama Journey’s End, Ziegler has found the humor in what might easily have been a stone-cold serious affair. James isn’t generally known as a laugh riot, but a surprising amount of The Heiress’s first two thirds plays like a drawing room comedy. At the same time—and this is what lifts the production into an entirely different zone—the emotional tension is palpable.
Ron Ehmke, Spree’s associate editor, is a writer and performer (www.everythingron.com). His survey of the Shaw’s 2006 season continues in our next issue. Festival tickets and information can be obtained by calling (800)511-SHAW or by visiting www.shawfest.com.
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