Born Yesterday at the Shaw Festival (a review)

The audiences at the Shaw Festival tend to be older, so we’re guessing that quite a few of the folks at the performance of Born Yesterday that we saw had, like us, seen the 1950 film version of the play, starring Broderick Crawford and Judy Holliday (who won the Oscar for best actress), at one time or another.  We’d also guess that most of them (like us) missed the 1993 remake, starring John Goodman and Melanie Griffith, who was nominated for, but did not win, the 1993 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress.

At any rate, the incidental music for the Shaw Festival’s production reminded us of Born Yesterday’s history in the motion pictures; the curtain rose to a sweeping orchestral overture in the style of the vintage movies of the 1940s. And Deborah Hay’s performance as Billie Dawn surely owed a good deal to Judy Holliday, star of both the original stage play and the 1950 movie.

Nothing wrong with that, though; Born Yesterday is a thoroughly entertaining show, the best production of a classic American comedy at the Shaw Festival since You Can’t Take It With You ten years ago.  Deborah Hay is a scream in the lead role.

The play begins as self-made junk tycoon Harry Brock (Thom Marriott) is moving into a suite at a posh Washington, D.C. hotel. Harry is intent on cornering the market on all the scrap metal that’s littering Europe after the war (WWII), and his scheme, devised by his $100,000 per year personal lawyer Ed Devery (Patrick Galligan), depends on his owning part of the United States government as well.  Harry intends to bribe an influential senator (Lorne Kennedy) to get rid of laws that stand in his way.

Deborah Hay as Billie Dawn

But his first meeting with the senator and his wife shows Harry that his long-time mistress Billie Dawn (Deborah Hay), a former chorus girl from Brooklyn, needs some polishing up before she’s ready for Washington society. Harry hires a young bespectacled reporter, Paul Verrall (Gray Powell), to give his culturally deficient mistress a crash course in literature, the arts, and politics. To everyone’s surprise, she takes to Thomas Paine and Dickens right away, she likes the pictures at the National Gallery, and she turns out to have an instinctive feel for the dynamics of crooked business deals.  As this is a romantic comedy, she also falls for her tutor.

Gray Powell as Paul Verrall, Deborah Hay as Billie Dawn

The storyline of gussying up a girl from the streets reminded us, naturally, of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Like Henry Higgins in that play, Harry Brock fails to foresee the full fruits of a cultural education for Billie Dawn.  After spending time with Paul, Billie Dawn realizes that Harry is crude, brutish, and ignorant.  Her political education also helps her realize that Harry is a crook and that his plan to buy a United States senator is (gasp) un-American.  (Emsworth has some thoughts on the ideological overtones of Born Yesterday in this post.)

The humor in Born Yesterday is not sophisticated, but it goes down easy.  The entire cast is marvelous, down to the small supporting roles (we liked especially Beryl Bain as Helen, Billie Dawn’s maid and friend, and Donna Belleville as Senator Hedges’s wife), but the tone of the show depends on Deborah Hay, who plays the brassy Billie Dawn to perfection.  Her repartee with Thom Marriott (as Harry Brock) is precious, and their hilarious ten-minute, mostly wordless game of gin rummy is worth the price of admission all by itself.

And of course it’s tremendously satisfying to see Harry get what’s coming to him. Harry Brock, a bully who knocks Billie Dawn around when she crosses him, may be the least attractive character you’ll ever see in a stage comedy. No lovable swindler he (like Max Bialystock in The Producers); meanness is his primary personal quality.

Vermeer's Girl with a Red Hat

For the second time at the Shaw Festival this year (see this post), we were delighted to see reproductions of some of our favorite art on stage; Billie Dawn brought home some color prints of pictures by Vermeer, Cezanne, and Gauguin from her excursions with Paul to the National Gallery.

The show we saw had some unintended drama. Outside the theater, the weather in Niagara-on-the-Lake was stormy, and throughout the play rolls of thunder were frequently heard (during scenes in which the skies of Washington, D.C., which were part of the scenery, were blue and cloudless!). In the final moments of the play, the power went off and the theater went dark for about ten seconds just as Patrick Galligan (playing the lawyer Ed Devery, and pitch-perfect as usual) was reaching the climax of his “justice and the American way” speech. Galligan was still holding his pose (to the applause of the audience) when the lights came on again.

We also appreciated the local connection: playwright Garson Kanin, who wrote Born Yesterday, was born in Rochester! Near as we can tell, he didn’t live here long enough for our town to make much of an impression on him, but we’ll take credit for him anyway. Aside from Rochester’s being the home of one of the finest actors of our time (Philip Seymour Hoffman), we don’t have many other show business types to brag about.

More thoughts about Born Yesterday — and Emsworth’s reviews of other Shaw Festival productions in 2009:

Left-wing ideology in Born Yesterday (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

Brief Encounters at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Love blooms in a railway coffee shop: Patrick Galligan and Deborah Hay in Still Life

The first of the several Noël Coward shows we’ll be seeing at the Shaw Festival this summer, Brief Encounters, was pure unadulterated pleasure, and we look forward to the others. These one-act plays are some of Coward’s very best work, and they’re presented intelligently and sympathetically.

Coward wrote these nine one-act plays in 1935 and called them Tonight at 8:30. He meant them to be performed as three separate shows of three plays each, but didn’t specify how they should necessarily be grouped. This particular show, directed by Jackie Maxwell, consists of a sequence of Still Life, We Were Dancing, and Hands Across the Show, three very different one-act plays that complement one another nicely. Ms. Maxwell directs it herself.

Krista Colosimo is wonderful in the supporting role of Beryl in Still Life

The first and finest of the three is Still Life, a wistful story of a young married woman (Deborah Hay) and an idealistic young married doctor (Patrick Galligan) who meet by chance in an English railway station and let themselves drift into an affair. (Theirs is not exactly a “brief encounter”!) For as little time as we get to spend with them, we come to know the characters awfully well — not only the guilt-ridden lovers Laura and Alec, but also the middle-aged widow Myrtle Bagot (Corrine Koslo — sassy and delightfully vulgar), who runs the station’s coffee shop, her giddy young assistant Beryl (Krista Colosimo — just delightful), and Mrs. Bagot’s admirer Albert (Thom Marriott — marvelous), a porter, who provide comic relief. Working-class romances for Mrs. Bagot and Beryl serve as a foil to the main plot.

In one of our volumes of Coward, there is a pared-down version of Still Life that has only three characters. But the Shaw Festival’s production, with Mrs. Bagot, Beryl, and their admirers, is so much richer. 

Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo in Still Life

We can’t think of any story, novel, or play that anatomizes the stages of a love affair quite so truthfully, painfully, and succinctly as Still Life. With a few deft strokes, Coward gives us the innocent first meeting of the lovers, their discovery of mutual sympathy, their “innocent” time together, their rationalizing, their secret liaisons and the exquisite pain of longing and guilt, and their inevitable confrontation with reality. As the illicit lovers, Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan approach their roles with delicacy and save the story from triteness. At the end, devastated by the end of her life’s great romance, Laura’s last goodbye in the train station is interrupted by the intrusion of an insensitive chatterbox acquaintance; this painful scene could not have been done better.

Still Life was the basis of a 1945 British movie called Brief Encounter, which explains why this Shaw Festival show is called Brief Encounters.  We were surprised to learn from our daughter-in-law that André Previn has just composed a new opera, also based on Coward’s play and also called Brief Encounter.  It premiered in Houston in early May 2009 to good reviews; see this link. We also recently learned, reading Garson Kanin’s memoir, Hollywood, that Brief Encounter was the inspiration for one of our favorite classic movies, The Apartment (starring Jack Lemmon).

Still Life represents Coward the sentimentalist. We were reminded of (and recommend) a favorite Coward short story, “Mr. and Mrs. Edgehill,” which has nothing to do with romance but which somehow evokes the same mood.

The second play, We Were Dancing, begins with a clever transformation of the set from a railway station to a South Sea island. (There is no intermission between the three one-act plays; instead, a break is taken halfway through We Were Dancing after a big song-and-dance number). This is the least substantial of these three plays in this show, but it has its moments.

The silver-haired Galligan

The play is a sort of light fantasy; Louise, a married woman on a South Pacific cruise (Deborah Hay again) falls in love with a stranger (Patrick Galligan again) while dancing under the stars; they decide to spend the rest of their lives together before they even learn each other’s names. Just before intermission, the show breaks out into a riveting “We Were Dancing,” delivered by a large dance ensemble. The contemporary arrangement of Noël Coward’s song works very well.

Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan in a serious moment in Still Life

The final play, Hands Across the Sea, a satire of the London social scene of the 1930s, is pure farce. It takes place in the London apartment of Piggy (Deborah Hay again), a socialite who has just toured the far East and has met more people than she can remember. Her husband Peter (Patrick Galligan again) is a military officer whose duties are light.

Into their apartment come the Wadhursts (Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo again). Piggy met them in Singapore and invited them to visit her in London, but she has forgotten their names and doesn’t want to ask. In a side-splitting episode with Peter at the piano, he and Piggy sing in code to each other as they try to figure out who their guests are. The phone keeps ringing, Piggy’s and Peter’s friends keep wandering in and out, and everyone talks at the same time. We were in stitches.

The cast of Hands Across the Sea

After seeing this show, we pulled out the battered copy of Tonight at 8:30 that we found on eBay last winter and read Hands Across the Sea. To our surprise, the lines, isolated one from the other on the printed page, hardly seemed funny at all. It required a stage, the right ensemble, and the right timing and delivery to bring them to life.

One of the show’s pleasures is seeing the same actors in two or three contrasting roles within the course of a two-hour show. Of these, the transformation of Thom Marriott from railway station porter (Still Life) to philosophical cuckold (We Were Dancing) to staid Englishman (Hands Across the Sea) was the most remarkable. We have new appreciation for his abilities.

Can it be that the ensemble was lip-syncing during the We Were Dancing big production number? We wondered at the time, but couldn’t believe it possible at the Shaw Festival, where it’s often hard to tell whether they’re even using sound reinforcement. Then a Rochester friend who saw this show a few days later said that he suspected lip-syncing too. Say it isn’t so, Jackie Maxwell!

We gave in to celebrity spotting after the show. Sitting in our car in the Festival Theater parking lot, we saw actor Ben Carlson, formerly a Shaw Festival star but now at Stratford, drive up in a small car. After a minute or two, Deborah Hay emerged from the building and climbed in. We’ve read that they’re engaged.

August 18, 2009: We see that the New York Times has noticed that the Shaw is doing  Tonight at 8:30 (see this post), although the writer mostly talks about the history of these one-act plays and doesn’t say much about these performances.

Emsworth reviews of other Shaw Festival productions in 2009:

John Osborne’s The Entertainer (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

We preview the Shaw Festival’s 2009 season

Even under Jackie Maxwell, Shaw Festival seasons have been fairly predictable — which, of course, suits Emsworth, who is deeply suspicious of change, just fine.

For instance, since The Devil’s Disciple hadn’t been seen at Niagara-on-the-Lake since 1996, it was overdue for one of the two slots for Shaw plays, and a good bet to pop up in 2009.

For Emsworth’s preview of the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season, which will feature two classic American comedies, The Women and Harvey, see this post.

And since the Shaw Festival did an O’Neill play three years ago, which we guessed and hoped was the beginning of an O’Neill cycle, an O’Neill play on the 2009 playbill would have been a good guess (in fact, we’ll get A Moon for the Misbegotten).

Noel Coward

We also would have laid money on another Noel Coward play in 2009, because Coward is always in rotation at the Shaw Festival. Maybe The Vortex!? That’s what we hoped. Or another pass at Cavalcade?

Well, the schedule’s out now, but there won’t be a major Coward play. Instead, there will be ten minor Coward works at the Shaw Festival this year, each a one-act play. Nine of these are collectively titled Tonight at 8:30; the ten pieces will be presented as part of four different shows. This year, Bernard Shaw won’t be the most-seen playwright at the Shaw Festival.

We’ll see most of the 2009 playbill, as usual.  Here’s why we’re interested in most of them — and less interested in a few of them.

Eugene O'Neill

1. A Moon for the Misbegotten (Eugene O’Neill) We’ve never seen this play, but we loved what the Shaw repertory company did with O’Neill’s comedy Ah, Wilderness two years ago, and we’ve wanted to see what it would do with an O’Neill play with a little more angst.

And we admire the work of director Joseph Ziegler, who was in top form with Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married in the season just ending (see the Emsworth review); he also directed Ah, Wilderness.  It’ll be at the Courthouse Theatre. The formidable Jim Mezon will play Josie Hogan’s father.

2. Play, Orchestra, Play (Noel Coward) This show will be made up of three of Noel Coward’s one-act plays: Red Peppers, Fumed Oak, and Shadow Play. Two of these have songs woven into the plot, one (Fumed Oak) is straight comedy. There’s no big musical at the Shaw Festival this year; these take its place. It’ll be at the Royal George Theatre, directed by Christopher Newton.

Lawrence and Coward

We know quite a few Noel Coward songs but not, in general, which of his shows they’re from. But burrowing into our library, we find that Coward and his stage partner Gertrude Lawrence played George and Lily Pepper, a music hall song-and-dance team, in Red Peppers in 1936 (so this show’s going to be lively). We also find that one of the two songs in Red Peppers is “Has Anybody Seen Our Ship?” while the two Coward songs in Shadow Play are “You Were There” and “Then”.

3. The Entertainer (John Osborne) The anti-establishment Englishman John Osborne is legendary; he’s the original angry young man.  But we’ve never seen his work. Existentialism and vaudeville will be a curious combination. 

We'll wait to see Olivier's movie till after we've seen the Shaw production

We learned recently, after watching an old interview with Lawrence Olivier, that the role of the washed-up comedian Archie Rice was written by Osborne for the great actor, who claimed, “”I have an affinity with Archie Rice,” Olivier once opined. “It’s what I really am. I’m not like Hamlet.”

We’re also very curious to see the Shaw Festival’s new small performing space, which is apparently the rehearsal studio at the Festival Theater. And we look forward to Benedict Campbell, a fantastic song-and-dance man in Mack and Mabel a couple of years ago, as Archie Rice. This play will run for less than two months, from July 31 through September 20. We’ll get our tickets early.

4. Brief Encounters (Noel Coward) Three more one-act plays by Noel Coward in this show: Still Life, We Were Dancing, and Hands Across the Sea. It’s in the Shaw Festival’s largest venue, the Festival Theatre. Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan, who were superb in 2008 in After the Dance, are in the cast.

We know one of these plays pretty well: Still Life, also known as Brief Encounter. It’s a painfully accurate sketch of an illicit love affair. We do know and love Coward’s highly-polished short stories; the stories and the one-act plays are closely related (but have some interesting differences that we hope to explore in a later post!). We think Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell is the Shaw’s best director. All in all, our expectations for this show are high.

Watching an episode of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey recently, we were pleasantly surprised to hear a bit of one of the songs from We Were Dancing from Henry, the chambers clerk who is responsible for getting briefs for Rumpole and his colleagues.  Henry and the  chambers secretary are part of an amateur theatrical group that was, in this episode, doing Noel Coward.  We’re guessing the British public has greater familiarity with the Tonight at 8:30 plays than we North Americans do.

Seurat's masterpiece

5. Sunday in the Park with George (James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim)  Somehow we’ve never seen this musical, but we surely know the painting that it revolves around, and so do you. It’s Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Like Ferris Bueller and his friends, we’ve admired it at the Art Institute of Chicago. Stephen Sondheim’s musical is about Seurat and the creation of his painting. There are those who think this is not merely one of the finest American musicals, but one of the finest American plays, period.

We don’t know the songs in the show either, only that they’re said to be written in a style similar to the pontillism (paintstrokes consisting of many small dots) for which Seurat was known. Steven Sutcliffe (Seurat) and Julie Martelli (his lover “Dot”) will have the lead roles. With Sunday in the Park with George, we will get to indulge our interests in art, music and drama all at once.

Bernard Shaw

6. The Devil’s Disciple (George Bernard Shaw) Honestly, the plays by Shaw are what we usually look forward to most.  And in 2008, the Shaw plays Getting Married and Mrs. Warren’s Profession were what we liked best at Niagara-on-the-Lake. 

But we didn’t take much to The Devil’s Disciple when we saw it in 1996, we haven’t enjoyed reading it since then, and we can’t get over feeling annoyed with the old lefty for feeling free to moralize about the American war for independence.

On the other hand, our acquaintance with Bernard Shaw is deeper than it was twelve years ago, so maybe our encounter with the play will be different this time around. And Evan Buliung will play Dick Dudgeon. We’re big fans, and even though we liked Buliung a lot in The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet in Stratford in 2008, we think he belongs at the Shaw Festival.

7. Ways of the Heart (Noel Coward) As noted, the three full-length Coward shows at the Shaw in 2009 are collectively titled Tonight at 8:30, and Coward meant them to be presented as a group, though not necessarily in any particular order.

This is the third of the Tonight at 8:30 shows : The Astonished Heart, Family Album, and Ways and Means, directed by Blair Williams, in the Shaw Festival’s smallest venue, the Courthouse Theatre, which could well be the best place in Niagara-on-the-Lake to see short-form Noel Coward. We know Ways and Means, an absolutely pitiless portrait of a young couple who sponge off their high-society friends. The cast includes Claire Juillien, David Jansen, and one of my favorites at the Shaw, Laurie Paton.

The Shaw Festival is doing all ten of the Shaw one-acts in the same day, starting at 9:30 a.m., on three separate days (August 8, August 29, and September 19, 2009). Too intense for us.

8. Star Chamber (Noel Coward) This Coward one-act play will be the Shaw’s lunchtime offering at the Courthouse Theatre. The Shaw’s promotional materials say that it’s “rarely produced,” but that’s an understatement. Coward apparently wasn’t happy with it; in 1936 he pulled it after only one performance and didn’t publish it with other plays. We doubt that Coward was a good judge of his own work.

9. Born Yesterday (Garson Kanin) By coincidence, Emsworth, who likes old films, happened to see the 1950 movie, starring Judy Holliday, and based on the original stage production, for the first time not long ago on Turner Classic Movies. So how do we feel about seeing a new stage version with Deborah Hay as Billie Dawn? Not very strongly, we guess.

Tremblay

10. Albertine in Five Times (Michel Tremblay) In our parochial ignorance, all we know about Michel Tremblay, the French-Canadian playwright, is that he wrote Hosanna, the flamboyant play with which the late Richard Monette (long-time artistic director at the Stratford Festival) made his name as an actor in 1974.

Albertine in Five Times appears to have an all-women cast, as did Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, one of Jackie Maxwell’s adventurous play choices early in her tenure at the Shaw. The cast will include Mary Haney and Patricia Hamilton.

What we want to know is, when are we going to have another Lorca play at the Shaw Festival?

11. In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (George Bernard Shaw) Even with the talented Peter Hutt (alas, he’s deserted to the Stratford Festival for the 2009 season) as King Charles, we remember the Shaw’s 1997 version of this Bernard Shaw as an extraordinarily talky, sleep-inducing play, even by Shaw’s standards of talkiness. It’s pretty far down on our list of favorite Shaw plays. But the 2009 cast for this show is very strong, with Benedict Campbell, Laurie Paton, Lisa Codrington, Mary Haney, and Graeme Somerville.

All in all . . . We think that putting all your eggs in one basket with four shows consisting of one-act plays no one’s ever heard of — and not including any popular musical in the playbill — is a bit risky. The Shaw plays are two of our least favorite. But we think we’ll like this season all right.

AUGUST 2009: We’ve seen a number of the 2009 Shaw Festival shows now; here’s what we thought of them:

Bernard Shaw’s comedy The Devil’s Disciple, set in America during the Revolutionary War (see this post)
Garson Kanin’s classic American comedy Born Yesterday (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

After the Dance at the Shaw Festival (a review)

After the Dance, playing through October 6 at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), is a terrific play, and director Christopher Newton and his cast are putting on a first-class show.

Emsworth previews the shows on the 2009 Shaw Festival playbill at this post.

Reading the program notes, Emsworth was reminded that many of his most memorable experiences at the Shaw Festival have been directed by Mr. Newton, not just plays like Noel Coward’s Cavalcade and Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan that are revived with some regularity, but also plays like Hobson’s Choice and Journey’s End that may have been popular in their day but are less known now.

After the Dance falls in neither category. It was a flop in 1939, and in America we don’t know the playwright, Terence Ratigan. Yet Coward himself might have been proud to have written this witty, insightful play.

Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan as Joan and David Scott-Fowler

It is 1938, and Joan and David Scott-Fowler have been married for twelve years. In the roaring twenties, they were among the bright young things whose drunken parties and carefully cultivated poses were chronicled by Evelyn Waugh in his wickedly funny novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Now, twelve aimless years later, life has become too, too boring for Joan and David and their friends.

David and Joan (played by Deborah Hay) are fond of each other, but their married life is as superficial as their social life. They hold parties in their stunning London apartment (designed by the Shaw’s William Schmuck), go to other people’s parties, and talk about parties past. And they have a permanent house guest in John Reid (played by Neil Barclay), who is witty, rotund, and unemployed.

They all drink, but David (Patrick Galligan) drinks too much. A history student in his university days, David works now and then on a biography of an obscure 19th-century Italian king; he has even hired his cousin Peter (played by Ken James Stewart) to take dictation and act as his secretary. But he knows his scholarship is shallow and that his prose is riddled with cliches.

Marla McClean and Ken James Steward as Helen and Peter

As the play begins, a new friend has come into David’s life, Peter’s 20-year-old fiance Helen (played by Marla McLean). Peter wants desperately to marry Helen, but his income is too small. What Peter does not know, but what everyone else sees, is that Helen has fallen in love with David and wants to rescue him from self-destruction. David and Joan’s marriage hangs uneasily in the balance.

It is easy to care about these characters and to hurt when they hurt. In a brilliantly-penned scene at the end of the first act, David tells Joan that his book is worthless and that there is no point in starting over. We know — as does she — that he is also talking about their wasted life together.

David is a marvelous role for the square-jawed, silver-haired Patrick Galligan, one of our favorite actors at the Shaw Festival. We couldn’t help being reminded of his role several years ago in Journey’s End, set twenty years earlier in a foxhole during the Great War, in which he held together his embattled platoon (and anchored the play) with nothing more than his character’s decency and calm good sense.

And we can’t remember when we’ve enjoyed the talented Neil Barclay quite this much. Barclay has exquisite comic timing, and his scenes with Galligan and with Jay Turvey (who plays one of the few characters who has actually made something of himself, and who wants to give John Reid a job) are highlights of the play. The only disappointment in the show is the role of young Peter Scott-Fowler, played by Ken James Stewart, whose acting skills fall short of the standards set by the rest of the cast.

Neil Barclay and Deborah Hay

As Julia Browne, a party friend of the Scott-Fowlers who sweeps on and off the stage, carrying all before her, Lisa Horner is a standout. Best of all is Deborah Hay as the vulnerable, intelligent Joan Scott-Fowler, who realizes all too late what keeping her emotional distance from her husband has cost her.