Star Chamber at the Shaw Festival (a review)

We wouldn’t for the world have missed Star Chamber, the one-act Noël Coward play that the Shaw Festival is putting on as its mid-day show this summer. It’s an absolutely hilarious send-up of self-absorbed actors at a committee meeting. This show starts at 11:30 a.m. and runs for about an hour at the Royal George Theater.

Here’s the storyline, such as it is: One by one, nine people arrive for a committee meeting that is to be held on the stage of a theater where one of them is performing. The nine are a board that is responsible for a old folks’ home for actresses. The serious-minded secretary of the board, Mr. Farmer (Guy Bannerman), who is the only non-actor on the board, is also the only the only one with any real interest in the business of the meeting, which is to consider some badly needed renovations to the home.

Neil Barclay

In fact, Mr. Farmer never can get the undisciplined actors to stop gossiping and pay attention to business. Johnny Bolton (Neil Barclay) constantly interrupts with old show business stories; no one listens to him. Dame Rose Maitland (Gabrielle Jones) cares mainly about taking the chair and bossing people around in the absence of the group’s president, Xenia (Fiona Byrne), who is late.

Evan Buliung and Fiona Byrne at the board meeting in Star Chamber

When the ditsy Xenia does arrive (looking and behaving very much like Barbra Streisand), she brings her Great Dane and gives it most of her attention. Eventually the actors give up any pretense of getting anything done and gather around the piano for a few songs.

The comic moments — sight gags, tart asides, self-important speeches, and actors playing to stereotype — start slowly, then come faster and faster. Our audience was reduced to continuous, helpless giggling about halfway through the show; we didn’t get control of ourselves till the curtain calls.

We marveled at their split-second timing of the ensemble. We certainly didn’t know any of Noël Coward’s show-business friends, on whom the play was presumably based, but how these characters reminded us of people we’ve met in community theater!

Sharry Flett with Stephen Sutcliffe in Sunday in the Park with George

We were glad to see Sharry Flett, who is still stunning, as a strong character again, rather than as a foggy old lady (her role this year in Sunday in the Park with George). Neil Barclay, born to play a ham, is precious as a rotund, veteran song-and-dance man.

The highlight of the songfest at the end was Evan Buliung’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” one of Coward’s best-known songs. (Buliung plays a dashing young actor, Julian Breed.) We were delighted to find, just before the show started, that Mr. Buliung’s parents were sitting next to us in the audience. They were very pleasant people who did not seem at all like stage parents and who were clearly very proud of their son (who is also starring in Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple at the Shaw Festival this summer). We are glad that Evan Buliung is back at the Shaw Festival this year after several years in Stratford (though what a fine Mark Antony he might have made in this year’s Julius Caesar).

Emsworth reviews of other 2009 shows at the Shaw Festival :

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)
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)

Sunday in the Park with George at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Anthony Malarky and Julie Martell as Louis the baker and Dot

On our way home from Niagara-on-the-Lake, we tried to think how they could have made Sunday in the Park with George more . . . well, more interesting. Better leads? Not the problem. Steven Sutcliffe and Julie Martell (as George and Dot) both sang well, acted well, looked well. We really didn’t think the show was badly paced.

It was hard to pinpoint any particular problem with the Shaw Festival’s show. But we both had trouble staying awake, and so did other people around us. Rochester friends who saw the show a week later reported the same.

There’s an expression “as exciting as watching paint dry.” That’s not literally what we were doing at the Royal George Theater, but it’s not much of a stretch between that and watching someone sketching a model and then watching him work on a painting, one tiny stroke at a time, in his studio.

Of course, this Stephen Sondheim musical does tell a story. And it revolves around one of the world’s most celebrated paintings, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (at the Art Institute of Chicago).

Seurat's large painting Bathers at Asnières is at the National Gallery in London

The first half of this musical play is a fictional vignette in the life of young Georges Seurat, whose first major work, Bathers at Asnières, was mocked by the critics.  George is now applying his innovative, dot-by-dot style to another, even more ambitious painting (ten feet wide) of Parisians enjoying the sun and the sights in La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine.

George's models for Bathers at Asnières

We meet George on the island working on a sketch for his new painting. His model (and mistress, who is in love with him) Dot is having trouble keeping still for him; she sings a song about how hot and uncomfortable she is. Colorful characters, including a mentally confused old lady (Sharry Flett) who turns out to be George’s mother, wander past George and Dot. They all end up in the painting. Dot is the young woman on the right with a parasol.

Several years after the scenes in the play, in 1888, Seurat painted Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor, also in his pontillistic style. This smaller painting is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Back in George’s studio, Dot sings about how frustrating it is to have a lover who spends all his nights painting instead of paying attention to her and taking her to the Follies.  Out on the town by herself, Dot meets and is courted by Louis the baker, who is planning to emigrate to America.  Should she marry the steady Louis, who will take care of her even though she is carrying George’s baby, or stick it out with George? Meanwhile, George’s paintings continue to be unappreciated by the Parisian art world. We learn most of this through the show’s songs; there’s relatively little dialogue.

All this takes place in 1884. The second act, somewhat more lively than the first, takes place a hundred years later in 1984 (which, not coincidentally, is when the show was premiered on Broadway). The “George” in the second act (also played by Steven Sutcliffe) is the fictional great-grandson of Georges Seurat, who died in 1891 at the age of 31.

George works the crowd

Twentieth-century George is an artist too; he creates Chromolumes, which are a kind of electrified sculpture and invention. Like his famous ancestor, he struggles with gaining recognition and funding for his work. At an art museum gala, George unveils and demonstrates his latest Chromolume, which is supposed to relate to Seurat’s masterpiece; with him is George’s very elderly grandmother, who is Dot’s daughter (born in America), and who tells the gathering about the people in Seurat’s painting.  At a reception afterward, George works the crowd, flattering potential patrons for his art. 

Of course Sunday in the Park With George won a Pulitzer in 1984, and who are we to argue? And personally, we enjoyed Stephen Sondheim’s sophisticated score, which riffs off Seurat’s pontillistic style of painting with short jagged motifs and dissonant chords. This music is challenging, but we disagree with those who say the tunes in this show aren’t memorable.

But it must be said that Sunday in the Park With George, taken as a whole, just isn’t compelling drama. The characters aren’t terribly interesting or sympathetic, and if the show’s creators meant to say something profound about Art and the plight of misunderstood artists, we failed to see that it was especially profound. For us the play had a kind of static quality. Much of the time nothing much seemed to be happening; halfway through the first act we felt as if we were waiting for Godot. The energy level rose during the whirlwind of the art museum reception in the second act; only then, and only briefly, were we drawn into the lives of the characters.

As for this particular production of Sunday in the Park With George at the Shaw Festival, which is well done, we have no complaints.

One of the very few other large-scale paintings by Seurat, titled The Bathers, is at the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A good portion of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is reproduced by Seurat in the background of the Barnes picture.

And we were tickled to see some of our favorite works of art on stage. As nearly as we can determine, the character of Dot, Georges Seurat’s mistress, is not a historical personage, so we didn’t learn much more about Seurat or his famous painting than we already knew. But we do like Seurat, and we enjoyed the fantasy of being present at the creation of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. And we were amused by the end of the first act, when all the characters arranged themselves on stage in a tableux that recreates the painting.

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières is also seen on stage early in the first act. And in this show one of Claude Monet’s best-known paintings, Garden at Sainte-Adresse, also makes a cameo appearance in the arms of of a rich American who is carrying it onto a ship that will take him (as well as Dot and Louis the Baker) to America. The scene (improvised by the director and not in the script) represents, we suppose, the cultural drain of art masterpieces from Europe to America. As a matter of history, the use of Monet’s painting is a bit of a stretch. According to information on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Garden at Sainte-Adresse was purchased from Monet by one Victor Frat, apparently a Frenchman, before 1870. The painting did not come to America until 1926; the Met bought it at a Christie’s auction in 1967.

Emsworth reviews of other 2009 shows at the Shaw Festival :

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)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

The Little Foxes at the Shaw Festival (a review)

(June 16, 2008) What a difference a director seems to make! At the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), the cast of The Little Foxes is practically the same as the cast of Getting Married (six actors appear in both plays). (I review Getting Married in another post.) In the Shaw comedy, everything comes off like clockwork, and the fun never stops. But the Lillian Hellman drama leaves you waiting for a climax that never really comes.

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

I have already complained at length about the ferocious Stalinist ideology of The Little Foxes in this post; in another I have griped about the holes in Hellman’s plot. Despite these objections, the play is a near-masterpiece. Hellman’s characters are frighteningly real, every word in the script tells, and the story builds to what ought to be a shocking denoument.

But not in this production. For the first half of the play (by far the best half) the great questions are whether Horace Gibbens is really going to come home to the nest of snakes that is the Hubbard family (his wife Regina and her brothers Ben and Oscar), and whether he will go along with the siblings’ scheme that he join them in investing $75,000 into a new cotton mill business. When Horace finally does come home, disabled in body but determined to frustrate the machinations of his wife and her brothers, the lines are drawn, and we all brace for heavy weather.

But just when you expect to be squirming in your seats and wiping your perspiring palms on your pants, this production lets you down. Laurie Paton, who is Regina, is an outstanding actress, but here she neither looks or acts like the Jezebel she is supposed to be playing; she looks too pleasant. Nor does David Jansen, as the likeable and sympathetic Horace, project the steely resolve needed for him to win the war of wills with his wife. Between these two sparks do not fly, and in their scenes together the tension does not build.

And so, at the play’s climax, we are not nearly as afraid for Horace, or for his and Regina’s uncorrupted daughter Alexandra (Krista Colosimo), or for any of the other characters, as the playwright wanted us to be. Nor, for a play with harsh political overtones, are we fearful for America, as Lillian Hellman fervently wanted us to be. As for Alexandra, who represents Hellman’s hope for revolution and a more “just” America, Ms. Colosimo is made to deliver all of Hellman’s shrill, socialist soapbox lines at the end of the play at the same high pitch.

I cannot see Peter Krantz, a Shaw Festival regular who plays Oscar Hubbard in the The Little Foxes, on the stages of the Shaw Festival without a return of the visceral feelings that he aroused in those that saw him as the predatory pervert in the Shaw Festival’s production of The Coronation Voyage several years ago. My reaction is quite unfair to Mr. Krantz, and after seeing him in Getting Married as the sympathetic, comic Boxer, I thought I might have shaken this unfortunate association. But his character in The Little Foxes is every bit as repulsive as his character in The Coronation Voyage, and as Oscar Hubbard he quite undid the salutory effect of his portrayal of Boxer.

The veteran Shaw actress Sharry Flett is simply wonderful in The Little Foxes as the gentle, abused, alcoholic, but still hopeful Birdie Hubbard (Oscar’s wife). She inspires both our pity and our affection, and the scenes in which she is disrespected or worse are exquisitely rendered. The Shaw’s production is worth seeing for her performance alone. Also highly satisfactory is Lisa Codrington in the meaningful and thematically important role of Addie.

For more about the storyline of The Little Foxes, see this post. For comment on the political implications of The Little Foxes, see this post.

The Shaw Festival’s production of Terence Rattigan’s outstanding 1943 play After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

Getting Married at the Shaw Festival (a review)

(June 6, 2008) Performances of George Bernard Shaw don’t get much sharper than the Shaw Festival’s 2008 production of the comedy Getting Married. This show kept an embarrassing grin on my face for more than two solid hours, the first time something like that has happened since last year’s The Philanderer. Only a repertory ensemble whose members have spent as much time with each other and with Shaw as these have, could do a show like this so well.

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

These actors understand Shaw’s wit and the rhythm of his cadences, and they deliver his lines so easily and with such timing that we hardly notice that Shaw’s comedy is a vehicle for radical ideas about marriage with which we most certainly do not agree (for instance, the idea that polyandry or marriage for an agreed term of years should be allowed). This production goes down so pleasantly that we hardly notice that, in this hundred-year-old play, Shaw was attacking laws concerning marriage (restrictions on divorce, financial responsibility of husbands for their wives’ torts, and so on) that are now mere historical curiosities. These laws were changed long before most of us were born.

Getting Married is the story of a wedding day that doesn’t come off as planned. Instead of putting on their wedding finery and appearing at the church, the young bride and groom are having second thoughts — not about each other, but about whether marriage carries too many risks, legal and social. Meanwhile, their friends and relatives, some single, some married, some trying to become unmarried, are experiencing their own hilarious crises.

Those who might tend to avoid a Bernard Shaw play because of the long, preachy speeches that slow down many of his plays should know that Getting Married has much less of this than usual. Getting Married was written only a year or two before his best-known play, Pygmalion, and has much the same lively spirit as that comedy.

Getting Married doesn’t really have a lead role. But the Shaw’s cast includes so many practiced scene-stealers that a lead is not missed. Chief among the culprits here are Michael Ball as the philosophical greengrocer Collins, on whom all the characters rely for everything (Alfred Doolittle, in Pygmalion, is undoubtedly a relative of Collins’s), Laurie Paton as the masterful, impossible Mrs. George, and the wonderful Norman Browning, who plays the same harrumphing lovable grouch that he always plays, and to the usual crowd-pleasing effect. Sharry Flett, as the gracious Bishop’s wife, is pitch-perfect. It has seemed to me that there have been fewer meaty roles lately for Michael Ball, my favorite actor at the Shaw, so it was good to see him in top form in Getting Married.

All in all, this show succeeds because of exceptional ensemble work. The real star of Getting Married is the director, Joseph Ziegler, who set the actors on a fine brisk pace.  Seated toward the front of the Royal George Theater, I enjoyed the “stereo” effect Ziegler achieved several times by positioning the actors so that rapid-fire lines from a half-dozen actors flew counter-clockwise around the stage.

I hope the problems that the inimitable David Schurmann was having with his voice the day we saw the show have been resolved. Fortunately, they didn’t detract from his performance.

The only jarring notes came during the bows, when a version of the sixties girl-group hit “Chapel of Love” came blaring out through the p.a. system and knocked the grin off my face.

The first time I experienced this sort of outrage was at the end of the Stratford Festival’s Troilus and Cressida about five years ago. As darkness fell at the end of that earthy and revelatory production, we were assaulted with the Nine Inch Nails tune “Closer,” with its immortal lyric, “I want to f*** you like an animal.” I understand that the Stratford’s new artistic director Des McAnuff has done the same thing at the end of this year’s Romeo and Juliet using the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.”

Enough already, I say. A great play transports us to other times and places. After the curtain falls, I’m in no hurry to be yanked back to 2008. Even less do I want to be dropped off rudely in the sixties. Directors should let us depart in peace.

See Emsworth’s reviews of other shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, including An Inspector Calls, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, and the classic American musical, with music by Leonard Bernstein, Wonderful Town. Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

Emsworth reviews the Stratford Festival’s 2008 production of Hamlet in this post.