Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Shaw Festival

Benedict Campbell as Lopakhin and Laurie Paton as Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya

You want variety if you’re thinking of seeing two Shaw Festival shows in one day.  For instance, you don’t necessarily want to see two yawner dramas like The Seagull and Heartbreak House within the course of nine hours.  We tried pairing a frivolous forties musical (see this post) with Anton Chekhov’s tragicomedy The Cherry Orchard and ended up with a nicely balanced day.  

On such doubleheader days we marvel at the repertory actors who are doing double duty.  The afternoon’s singing and dancing star of One Touch of Venus, Robin Evan Willis, for example, reappeared in the evening’s The Cherry Orchard as Anya — and we are in a position to report that Ms. Willis still had time between shows to have drinks at the Epicurean with what looked like out-of-town friends.  It was probably well that, in her first scene in The Cherry Orchard, Anya is supposed to be exhausted from a long journey.  Mark Uhre, Neil Barclay, Gabrielle Jones, and Julie Martell all delivered high-energy performances in the musical before walking across the street to use their heavy acting chops in the Chekhov play in the intimate confines of the Court House Theatre, where the actors are only inches apart from the patrons. 

Neil Barclay as Pishchik and Laurie Paton as Ranyevskaya

The Cherry Orchard is dear to our heart, and judging from the snippets of animated conversations we overheard at intermission, many of our many fellow patrons also had decided feelings about the play. It can’t be easy for a director like Jason Byrne to bring something fresh into a play so well-loved by so many, but we think he succeeded.  The Shaw Festival show is intelligently planned and exceptionally well-acted, and we found it genuinely moving.

The Cherry Orchard gives us several painful scenes in the life of a family of Russian aristocrats around the turn of the last century. The central figure is Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya (Laurie Paton), a widow whose large estate has a formerly magnificent cherry orchard that she considers “the one remarkable thing in the whole province.” As her brother Gayev (Jim Mezon) chimes in, it’s mentioned in “the Encyclopedia.”

But as much as she professes to love her home, Ranyevskaya has spent the last six years off in Paris wasting her fortune on a worthless lover while working out her grief from the accidental drowning of her small son.  She and and her daughter Anya (Robin Evan Willis) arrive back home just weeks before the estate is to be sold at foreclosure.  Even though the situation presents a business opportunity for himself, Ranyevskaya’s wealthy neighbor Lopakhin (Benedict Campbell) magnanimously urges her to save herself from financial ruin by taking an axe to the cherry orchard and converting the land into riverside summer cottages for upwardly mobile city-dwellers. 

As the family dithers, Yepikhodov plays his guitar for Dunyasha in the estate gardens. This illustration by Lajos Szalay is in one of our editions of The Cherry Orchard.

Ranyevskaya and Gayev can no more deal with this crisis than the czars could deal with the conditions that would lead to the communist revolution only a few years later. Still less can they hear advice from Lopakhin, whose father was, after all, only a serf. Together with their equally impecunious neighbor and constant houseguest Pishchik (Neil Barclay), they all dither until the day of the auction, expecting, like Micawber, that something will “turn up.” 

What riveted us in this Cherry Orchard was the relationship between Ranavskaya and Lopakhin.  Even though Ranyevskaya still thinks of her wealthy friend as a peasant boy, she is, paradoxically, anxious for her stepdaughter Varya (Severn Thompson) to be married to this very man. 

Early in the play, Lopakhin remembers when, as a child, his drunken father bloodied his nose and Ranyevskaya washed him up, saying, “Don’t cry, little peasant; it’ll mend by your wedding day.” A footnote in one of my editions indicates that this is just a proverbial Russian phrase, but Chekhov’s use of it was no accident. Decades after the bloody-nose episode, Ranyevskaya is hoping to see Lopakhin married in earnest. Is she thinking only of how such an alliance could save them all from poverty?  Or does she also mean to patronize the grown-up peasant boy?  Would she and Gayev still be anxious to bestow Varya on Lopakhin if Varya’s father had been a nobleman, not merely a lawyer? 

And what of Lopakhin and his heart-breaking inability to propose to Varya? Before seeing this show, we chalked it up to the inability of any Russian in this play to act sensibly or decisively. But now it seems clear to us that Lopakhin cannot propose to Varya because he is, instead, in love with the unattainable Ranyevskaya. He agrees to speak to Varya only because, like a peasant, he can deny Ranyevskaya nothing to her face.  But there will be no wedding day; his peasant’s nose, figuratively speaking, will be bloodied and unmended for the rest of his life. 

Robin Evan Willis, Laurie Paton, Severn Thompson, Jim Mezon

The cast of The Cherry Orchard is the Shaw Festival’s “A” team. Jim Mezon overpowered a weaker cast last year in A Moon for the Misbegotten, but here, working with actors of the same rank, he is an ideal Gayev, a drone of a brother given to meaningless eloquence. As the much-abused Varya, Severn Thompson gives a nuanced, genuinely moving performance, the best we can remember seeing from her. Laurie Paton is finest of all as the tragic Ranyevskaya; every word, gesture, and glance from her tells. 

The family leaves the cherry orchard estate. Lajos Szalay's illustration: "Good-bye to the old life!"

We don’t know what to make of the fact that each of three shows we’ve seen so far this year at the Shaw Festival involves elements of magic. In Harvey, of course, the pooka himself is magical and the story is spiced with supernatural events. In One Touch of Venus, a statute transforms into a goddess who, in one scene, disappears like magic from a barber’s chair. And in The Cherry Orchard, Anya’s governess, Charlotta (Gabrielle Jones), who was raised among gypsies, performs magic tricks for the amusement of the family.

Emsworth’s take on the Shaw Festival’s production of the Kurt Weill musical One Touch of Venus is at this post. His review of the classic American comedy Harvey, also in repertory at the Shaw Festival, is at this post.

Emsworth’s pre-season thoughts on all the shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season are at this post.

One Touch of Venus at the Shaw Festival

Here’s the storyline:

Out of nowhere into the life of a meek young fellow comes a vivacious, unconventional young woman who attaches herself to him and puts him in compromising situations. With his spirit and libido aroused, he realizes that he needs to dump the shrill-voiced shrew he’s engaged to.

It’s the plot of the 1972 movie What’s Up, Doc? (with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal) — one of our very favorites — and also of the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby (with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant).

Whitelaw Savory (Mark Uhre) and his sassy assistant Molly Grant (Deborah Hay, who sings the show's title song)

And it’s also the plot of the only musical play the Shaw Festival is putting on this summer, One Touch of Venus, which is something of a forgotten classic. (Forgotten, probably, because it’s a little too risque for high school drama clubs; we guess that more people see musical plays in high school auditoriums than anywhere else.)

Like a lot of the musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, the story is thin and the characters tend to be cliches rather than real people — we’re thinking, for example, the role of Molly Grant (Deborah Hay), an archetype of the hard-boiled, sharp-tongued assistant who is probably in love with her boss. This is not one of the “great” American musicals, we wouldn’t say. But the songs and Kurt Weill’s music are wonderful, there are some fine comic scenes, and the Shaw Festival’s production is energetic and full of good performances.

Dance (1) by Henri Matisse. This 1909 painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The centerpiece of the show is Venus, a priceless statue that wealthy Manhattanite Whitelaw Savory (Mark Uhre) has acquired on the black market for his private art gallery, which is otherwise devoted to modern art. (This art museum junkie’s heart was warmed to see Whitelaw’s studio strewn with reproductions of Matisse’s “Dance” and other masterpieces by Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, and (we think) Robert Delaunay and Paul Klee (somebody tell us if we’re right!). The show’s first big song-and-dance number, “New Art Is True Art,” makes fun of modern art’s supposed disdain for traditional art.

The goddess of love comes on strong to Rodney Hatch

No sooner is the love goddess’s statue delivered to the gallery and removed from her crate than a mild-mannered barber, Rodney Hatch (Kyle Blair) arrives at the studio to give Whitelaw a shave. Left alone with the statue, Rodney pulls out an engagement ring that he has just bought for his fiancée and impulsively puts it on the statue’s finger. Amids pyrotechnics, Venus (Robin Evan Willis) comes to life and promptly falls for Rodney, whose ring has apparently broken an ancient spell. She heads off through Manhattan (pausing on her way to sing “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”) and reappears in Rodney’s apartment, where she tries to seduce him.

Meanwhile, Rodney Hatch is chased both by detectives who think he has stolen the statue and by Turks wielding daggers who are seeking to recover their stolen goddess. The chase leads to “Catch Hatch,” a long, frenetic dance sequence featuring much of the cast that is a highlight of the show. In one of the play’s funniest scenes, Rodney goes to the bus station to pick up his stunning but ill-tempered fiancée Gloria (Julie Martell) and his impossible future mother-in-law (perfectly played by Gabrielle Jones); their reunion is interrupted when Venus suddenly materializes. Rodney extricates himself from Gloria, but his romance with Venus hits a snag when the goddess realizes to her dismay that Rodney wants to install her as a housewife in Ozone Heights, a dreary subdivision on Staten Island.

Great harmony from Neil Barclay as Stanley, Kyle Blair as Rodney Hatch, Jay Turvey as Taxi Black, Mark Uhre as Whitelaw Savory

As Venus, Robin Evan Willis is the full package, a stunning, sensuous blonde whose voice has all the range that Kurt Weill’s songs need. We enjoyed all her numbers, including One Touch of Venus‘s best-known song, “Speak Low.” She is well-matched with Kyle Blair, a fine comic actor with a pleasant tenor voice.  We got a kick out of an excellent comic barbershop quartet number (sung in Rodney Hatch’s barbershop), “The Trouble With Women.” The lyrics of the last verse:

When I drove in my glamorous Chevy
I would park in a suitable spot
Then I’d turn to the girls like a heavy
And inquire if they would or would not
I always implied that they had to
But, oh jiminies, was I perplexed
On the night that one said she’d be glad to
I didn’t know what to do next

For the first time that we can remember with a Shaw Festival musical, though, we had issues with both the tempos and the balance on several songs. On the show’s first several numbers, we simply couldn’t make out what the actors were singing; the orchestra was too loud, and the lyrics went by too quickly. The problem was especially acute on Rodney’s ragtime-style “How Much I Love You,” whose lyrics by Ogden Nash are made up of one witty, rapid-fire simile after another.  If music director Ryan deSouza plays Scott Joplin, he ought to be familiar with the instruction Joplin usually inscribed on the sheet music for his rags: “It is never right to play ‘rag-time’ fast.”

We weren’t the only people at our preview performance with trouble hearing lyrics; all around us, people weren’t laughing at the comic songs for exactly the same reason. (It wasn’t a problem with “The Trouble With Women,” though.) Mind, we don’t suggest amplifying the performers; we like to hear vocals coming from mouths instead of speakers.  And we thought the singers were projecting well enough.  But perhaps a smaller orchestra would have suited the show in this venue. A three-piece rhythm section, a trumpet player, and a woodwind player would have done nicely.

We also questioned the pace of Robin Evan Willis’s first featured solo, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself.” This is a bluesy number whose mildly suggestive lyrics didn’t seem to have maximum impact at the relatively brisk tempo set by the band.

Ava Gardner in the 1948 film

We ran across an excellent essay on “One Touch of Venus” by Mark N. Grant (see this link), which we recommend, and from which we learned that the inspiration for “Speak Low” was the line “Speak low, if you speak love,” from Act II, Scene 1 of “Much Ado About Nothing,” spoken by Don Pedro to Hero. We were also pleased to find that the original Broadway cast recording of One Touch of Venus, featuring Mary Martin in her first major role, is still available; we’ve been listening to it on Rhapsody.

Emsworth’s take on the classic American comedy Harvey, also in repertory at the Shaw Festival, is at this post. And his thoughts on Chekhov’s masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard, are at this post.

Emsworth’s pre-season thoughts on all the shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season are at this post.

We preview the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season

The poster for the original stage production of One Touch of Venus, the only musical on the 2010 playbill

We enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out what’s really going on at the Shaw Festival from the official clues. To our eyes, the 2010 schedule of plays shows that the Shaw is shifting direction, possibly because of the glum report that Shaw Festival theaters were only 63.5 percent full in 2009, down from 70 percent in 2008.

But we still like the 2010 lineup. We’ll begin with the shows we’re most looking forward to and end with a couple we may skip.

1. The Women (Clare Boothe Luce). Emsworth takes credit for this one. A year ago, reviewing the dreadful Hollywood version of The Women, we broadly hinted that this play was way overdue at the Shaw Festival (last seen in 1985, when Nora McClellan played the much-abused Mary Haines).  To the Shaw Festival: Thanks for taking requests! 

Clare Boothe Luce, a successful playwright during the 1930s, a Republican congresswoman in the 1940s

The Women is on our short list of the finest plays of the twentieth century, a tale of ruthless, catty, insecure society women behaving in beastly ways to one another, a play liable to make you quirm in discomfort and laugh at the same time.  (The Office is not an altogether original concept.) When it’s over you’ll realize you never actually saw any men on stage. By our count, this is the fourth play with an all-female cast that Jackie Maxwell has programmed since she’s been in charge — not a bad idea, since just at this point in its history, the female contingent of the Shaw company is remarkably strong. Deborah Hay, Mary Haney, Kelli Fox, and Sharry Flett will be among The Women. Ms. Hay will play Sylvia Fowler, the treacherous friend of Mary Haines, to be played by Jenny Young.

2. Harvey (Mary Chase).  If classic American comedies are what people will pay money to see (as was the case with Born Yesterday in the season just past; see Emsworth’s review of that excellent show), why not put on two? This play won the Pulitzer in 1945, and the 1950 movie starring Jimmy Stewart is among Emsworth’s five favorite films.

Elwood Dowd (James Stewart) admires a portrait of himself and Harvey in the 1950 movie

Harvey is, of course, the sentimental, half-magical story of the ever-pleasant, alcoholic, eccentric Elwood Dowd and his socially inconvenient friend Harvey, an invisible six-and-a-half foot rabbit.  Joseph Ziegler will direct; he’s one of the Shaw’s best. Peter Krantz will play Elwood Dowd and Mary Haney his distracted sister Veta.

3. One Touch of Venus (Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman). The Shaw Festival is evidently ceding the field of expensive big production musical plays to the Stratford Festival. In 2007 and 2008, the Shaw put on two of the finest musicals we’ve ever seen (Mack and Mabel and Wonderful Town), but they evidently weren’t as popular as they needed to be. The Shaw’s 2009 musical, Sunday in the Park with George, was, as we sorrowfully reported, a crashing bore (see this post).

So the Shaw is trying to re-create past glories. Back in 2005, the Shaw pulled Kurt Weill’s edgy musical Happy End out of utter obscurity; it did so well that they brought it back in 2006.  In 2010, it’ll be One Touch of Venus, a not-quite-so-obscure Kurt Weill musical about what happens when a barber from the New York suburbs brings a priceless statue of Venus to life (they fall in love). The songs include “Speak Low,” which we know mostly from Barbra Streisand’s “Back to Broadway” album a few years ago. Robin Evan Willis will play the goddess; Deborah Hay also appears.

James M. Barrie

4. Half an Hour (James M. Barrie) We are extraordinarily partial to both the novels and the plays of J. M. Barrie (see this Emsworth review of a recent Barrie biography) and think he belongs in the top tier of English writers.  This poignant one-act play — we’ve only read it, never seen it — is superb drama, as a mistreated young wife flees to a lover. Expect an emotional roller-coaster and a shocking plot twist. But don’t expect Half an Hour to be anything like Peter Pan — it’s more in the vein of Noël Coward’s Still Life, which the Shaw presented in 2009 (see Emsworth’s delighted review). The talented and extremely attractive Diana Donnelly will play Lady Lillian.

This will be the “Lunchtime” offering at the Shaw this year.  These hour-long $30 shows are a great bargain, though we wonder how Half an Hour will take up the full hour of the show. Might there be another short one-act Barrie play? Coincidentally, Peter Pan is on the playbill at the Stratford Festival for 2010.

5. An Ideal Husband (Oscar Wilde). Once again, the Shaw’s looking backwards; An Ideal Husband was such a hit in 1995 that the Shaw brought the production back for a second year. But we don’t weary of Wilde and applaud the Shaw Festival for keeping his plays in rotation. An Ideal Husband is the story of a woman who worships her husband, a hot-shot British politician, to be played by the silver-haired Patrick Galligan; she’s ill-prepared to learn from a morally challenged rival that her husband has a skeleton in his closet. (Insider trading, of all things, is a theme at the Shaw in 2010.)

6. Serious Money (Caryl Churchill). Candidly?  We’re skeptical of contemporary plays that we don’t know anything about, and ticket prices being what they are, we don’t often take chances. We’ve been burned too often with newer plays that aren’t any better than mediocre TV sitcoms.  Not to say that good plays haven’t been written in the last fifty years — we know all about Edward Albee, August Wilson, Neil Simon, and David Mamet – but we’re not good at sifting the wheat from the chaff.  So if the Shaw Festival is going to weed out the dreck of the post-modern era and bringing the good stuff to Niagara-on-the-Lake, we’re all for it.

We don’t know much about Caryl Churchill except that she’s a leftist with an interest in gender issues. That would ordinarily be a recipe for dreariness and drivel.  But Churchill is also said to be one of the finest living English playwrights, and Shaw Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell still has capital with us, so we’ll give Serious Money a shot. The play was written in 1987 and apparently has to do with shenanigans in the stock market.

This contemporary drama will be at the new, small Studio Theater space where The Entertainer was presented in 2009. (We liked both the space and the John Osborne play; see this Emsworth review). We are grateful to see that tickets for shows in the Studio Theater space are cheaper — only $49 — though we’re not quite sure why. Or perhaps we do — would we pay full price for a pig in a poke?

7. The Doctor’s Dilemma (George Bernard Shaw). What does it say about the status of Bernard Shaw at the Shaw Festival when no Shaw play is scheduled to be performed till mid-June, nearly three months after the season starts?  Ominously, a recent piece in one of the Toronto papers suggested that Shaw’s standing among playwrights of the modern era isn’t what it used to be. Is it possible that the Shaw Festival is beginning to feel weighed down by having to build its seasons around Shaw?

We hope not — the Shaw plays have been better than ever in recent years, including The Devil’s Disciple, which was one of the best things we saw anywhere in 2009 (see this post) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (ditto in 2008; see this post).  The Doctor’s Dilemma deals with a doctor (Patrick Galligan) who has to choose between two patients who need the same life-saving treatment; he can treat only one.  Now that Obamacare has become law in the United States, of course, the theme has renewed relevance for us patrons from the United States.

8. The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov). Ever since we saw a marvelous production of this play at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn last winter (see our review), The Cherry Orchard has rated as one of our very favorite plays. The cast will include Shaw all-stars Benedict Campbell and Jim Mezon. Sadly, the exquisite Goldie Semple, who had been scheduled to appear in this play, passed away last winter. We’re looking forward to seeing it close up in the Courthouse Theatre.

A scene from one of the earlier productions of The Age of Arousal (we borrowed the image from Linda Griffiths's website)

9. The Age of Arousal (Linda Griffiths). Two contemporary plays in one season? Things are definitely changing at the Shaw Festival. Written in 2007, this play is practically fresh off the press. Set in 1885, The Age of Arousal is about a London suffragette, Mary Barfoot, who opens a typewriting school to help young women become independent.

Linda Griffiths is an award-winning Canadian playwright and actress, but this is the first this American has heard of her. So many contemporary writers find Victorian mores an inviting target; we hope the play’s not just another version of “isn’t it awful how repressed they were before the sexual revolution?” Or, God forbid, a stage version of a bodice-ripper.

10. John Bull’s Other Island (George Bernard Shaw). We saw this play at the Shaw Festival in 1998 and again here in Rochester at GeVa Theater several years ago, and we just haven’t taken to it. So we figure to give it a miss in 2010, feeling we are not bound to like every Shaw play. It’s the story of a couple of men from London who go to Ireland and get mixed up with a Irish beauty and local politics. Benedict Campbell and Graeme Somerville will play Tom Broadbent and Larry Doyle.