THE MILLIONAIRESS
“Money for Nothing”,” Money Money Money” “Pennies from Heaven” – all perky, hook-rich tunes from the speakers, as we enter the Court House theatre for Shaw’s The Millionairess, music that celebrates the root of all evil to a compelling beat.
Then, in the program, a quote from GBS: “What is to be done with that section of the possessors of specific talents whose talent is for money making. History and daily experience teach us that if the world does not devise some plan of ruling them, they will rule the world. Now it is not desirable that they should rule the world; for … the supremacy of the money maker is the destruction of the State. A society which depends on the incentive of private profit is doomed.”
And for those who feel that Shaw is no longer relevant, the following is from The Observer’s front page just last Sunday: “A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.”
Director Blair Williams’ production of The Millionairess certainly hits home as a warning about the human madness inherent in capitalism, to be sure, especially with the profit motive so embedded in Epifania, in an inspired performance by Nicole Underhay. But if you saw Williams’ rapidly-paced production and remount of The President a few years ago, which I did three times, you’ll know he has an unwavering gift for comic rightness, a gift he brings to the current mounting of The Millionairess. Albeit the production’s spine-chilling message about uncontrolled greed, this is an exquisitely funny show.
Williams is a meticulous director, one whose every move has theatrical value, and yet his results seem spontaneous. Characters seem to speak as an extension of the momentum Williams has created and the movement of all these characters shows the fluidity of dance. When not acting, these characters react, always in tune with a precisely created and prevailing comic spirit. Thus, even without sound, this production could be a silent film of engaging animated gestures and expressions.
And I’ve never quite experienced a set like this creation by Cameron Porteous. It’s a completely blood red office in which a lawyer plays a blood red ukulele beside a blood red table on which sits a blood red phone. The raging capitalist, Nicole Underhay’s Epifania Ognisanti Di Parerga, enters in a blood red suit and blood red hat. This is primal stuff, an atmosphere of blood and, in Epifania, personification of the bloodthirsty. Epifania is summarized in this exchange: you’re “the meanest woman on earth”…..“that’s why I’m the richest”.
Epifania is cruelly clueless to the damage she does. She embodies the self-perpetuation of greed, and is truly scary as a monster of capitalism, one who will accept no autonomy that does not feed her coffers. Yet one becomes entranced by this comedic wonder of a performance, with its multi dimensional glances and the multitudinous shapes of Ms Underhay’s enunciating lips. Underhay doesn’t merely chew up the text with determined teeth but, instead, it seems, her upper and lower fangs meet as she bites down hard on everything in her way. “There is nothing one can want more than money,” she rhapsodizes, because money is the air she needs to breathe.
The whole cast in this gem of a production is perfectly tuned to Shaw’s mix of entertainment and message, and one might easily find analogy in a perfectly-formed Mozart symphony to describe it. Martin Happer, as endearing husband Alastair, is strong jawed, rigidly posed in masculinity, with guy gestures that are firm and starched. Ideas are beyond him, but he finds a “mind mate” in the Patricia of Robin Evan Willis whose facial contortions tell their own tales, as she knits and makes her points through pleasant innuendo, while her long legs do leggy duty. Steven Sutcliffe’s Adrian is a good old young chap with a mustache and cane and with moneyed affectation in his laughter. He’s a smiling airhead and hilarious in self-pity. Kevin Bundy plays lawyer Julius with a noteworthy lightness of touch and physicality, while the Doctor played by Kevin Hanchard is subtly but firmly present with life smarts and earthy serenity.
Shaw also includes a pivotal scene involving the poor, poignantly and effortlessly realized by Michael Ball and Wendy Thatcher as Joe and Joe’s wife. These are the poor who know their place and want to keep it that way, the poor who say “we know our ways,” the poor who “do not trust a bank” because “no good comes out of banks.” These are the poor who work in “slavery for next to nothing” while their employer, “an exploiter of misery” maintains that “business is business,” even as lives are thrown out on the street.
Yes, this production is analogous to Mozart. I didn’t witness one false note as each character, each delivery, each movement, seemed perfectly and vibrantly placed, and with delightful results. All ingredients seemed at one with the momentum of the play’s development. The playwright’s message about greed and need is delivered with a firm but light touch by an exceptionally tuned cast. This is terrific theatre here, one that demands a repeat visit.
MISALLIANCE
Misalliance is an often engaging production that sometimes gets in its own way and almost undermines some well-realized performances with distracting and exaggerated physical business. The Festival company is long and widely known as more than able to negotiate lengthy Shavian texts with style and ease and personality, so the decision to feature overplayed physicality is ill-judged. Ben Sanders’ Bentley, for one, with his cane and posturing attitude, is certainly pointedly created as a dislikable little shit who loves to annoy, but his tendency to fall into excessive screaming fits shows a director going too far.
Likewise, the encounter of Jeff Meadows Johnny with a bee, including animated facial and body gestures as he pursues it with a cricket bat, seems artificial and imposed. Craig Pike as Gunner, on pinching his finger on the gun, goes the big gesture route to make sure we get the point. On the other hand, a discussion about parents and children between Thom Marriot as John and Peter Krantz as Lord Summerhays is entertaining, mind-provoking, and listenable, because these are thought out characters who blend personality, ideas and humour implicit in the text.
Setting the play, first produced in 1910, in 1962 gives occasion to some awkwardness. A few grinding guitars in 4/4 do not an era make and all the straining to be current doesn’t work in this production. Talk of a hi-fi doesn’t jive with talk of free libraries, but it’s especially in dialogue reflecting Shaw’s time that the play is so not the sixties. Try “I can’t tell you in the presence of ladies” or “the lie that this lady behaved improperly in my presence” or “a ripping fine woman” or much chatter about “the correct thing.”
If this be the sixties, the oh-so-long-ago “You chased me through the heather and kissed me!” makes one wonder how the female speaker and her pursuing male did not trip over the love generation screwing among the flowers. On the other hand, Johnny’s remark that “Independence for women is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed.” doesn’t fit into the mythology of the 60’s, at least as portrayed by the media, though it might be seem spoken today in 2012 by Republicans and Conservatives of North America -and French politicians. In any case, the updating is not sufficiently comfortable with the original text.
Another problem appears in, say, Hypatia’s remark about Summerhays’s age, since there is no way that Peter Krantz, makeup and all, could be her grandfather. In cadence and inflection and colouring, he sounds perhaps elderly, but he still looks young playing old. Catherine McGregor as Mrs Tarlton is seemingly too young a parent for these offspring we see on stage, so are we left to assume that there was perhaps copulation in the nursery at one time to produce parents and offspring so obviously close in age?
Thom Marriot as Tarlton, has a brain full of references -“read your Darwin”… “read Ibsen”… “read Chesterton”…. “read what’s his name”- and is funny. Self-assured and solidly dynamic, impending oratorical in speech as if spoken from a mountain top that he of course owns, this Tarlton has no doubt sold much underwear, and we keep watching him. Catherine McGregor clearly shows his wife to be appealing and aloof at one go and, when her irritation gets picky, the goings on here heat up.
Krista Colosimo’s restless Hypatia is a solid declarative presence, one with inner energy that wants out. She reveals a lusty delight and lusty gusto, does not want to “whither into a lady” and declares “I can be wicked and I am quite prepared to be.” She stocks Wade Bogert-O’Brien’s Joey in bare feet and with raised skirt and obviously she wants to raise it higher. Meanwhile, Joey punctuates his lines with bends in his joints and with mechanically vibrant movements, and proves a young man of complexity in this somewhat brief but interesting performance.
And there’s Tara Rosling’s –and I’ll say this just once- Lina Szczepanowska. This delightfully realized creation is bluntly level headed about danger and everything else, since she comes from “a tradition of risk takers,” is used to “offers” from men, and likes to read psalms from a music stand as she juggles six balls in the air. She maintains, “You can see through a man at a glance” and asks, “ Have you learned everything from books?” while others declare “Let the family be rooted out of civilization” and “Prospero didn’t tempt providence, Prospero was providence” and “Democracy reads well but it doesn’t act well, like some people’s plays.” Actually, this play does act well, even in this production for the most part, when it trusts the playwright and plays for wit -and not so much to the pit.
PRESENT LAUGHTER
Having created himself as a masterpiece of persona, the much-talented Noel Coward was the quintessential man of theatre, a man, as it were, for whom life and performance overlapped often as one. His near-perfectly constructed comedy, Present Laughter, concerns matinee idol Garry Essendine and says much about the oh so theatrical theatricality of the theatrical. It’s a penetrating and hilarious look at life off the stage, one that shows how Essendine as Coward’s acknowledged representative is always acting, playing a role, performing the essentials of life as unmastered ambiguities, proving all the world’s a stage.
Director David Schurmann’s unobtrusively detailed production allows no throwaways and always informs in, say, the response to a gift in a box or the response to an off taste in the coffee. As well, motivic business helps to sew threads of plot together, say, with Garry repeatedly touching up his hair in the nearest mirror or with running gag complications involving a guest room. In time all confidences are revealed to much believable indignation by the many deceivers here and brief orations of life wisdom -“ there is far too much nonsense talked about sex… the whole business is vastly overrated…I will be happy to go to bed with an apple and a good book”-seem natural to these characters.
Steven Sutcliffe’s Garry is driven by an all directions urgency, often implying a self-indulgent crisis in the works. He delivers his lines as if oozing his words like thick, condescending jam. While embracing the hapless Daphne and turned to the balcony, he is patient in waiting for adoration; he speaks to Daphne up close like an Edwardian actor nobly delivering his cruel fate. At one point he observes, “I’m always acting, watching myself go by” and it’s true that each sentence he speaks seems a melodrama. Garry is very “me” and as he sees himself a victim of the world’s assumed demands; he is indignant about everything. Over the top is his regular gear and Sutcliffe, with briefest exception, rings true and is hilarious.
Clare Julian as former wife Liz displays a kindly lush womanhood and speaks with the patient authority of intimate understanding, especially of Garry. She is girlishly chiding of her ex and she counters his broad presence, game by game, with a sense of knowing and a sense of fun. One believes they were married. Delightful Mary Haney’s Monica is a figure of quiet authority and she speaks politely and incisively, with a crisp, low key, and twisting enunciation that owns each of her encounters with the others. Jonathan Tan’s Mr. Maule amuses with his youthfully driven dislike for “the commercial theatre.” He is likeably adolescent, all wide eyed and frenzied with his ideas, a master of quick changes of position and perfect landings, and very funny.
Daphne, played by Julia Course is quite believable in innocence, gullibility, and star struck availability. Her emotional delivery of Shelly inspires much laughter. Moya O’Connell’s Joanna is sexy in enticing shadings of feline, as she explores how to get her way in each situation. Her seductive claws always seem to rest on the flesh of others, and she is one who withdraws her signals until she can better read those of the other. She is predatory in coyness, or “as predatory as hell,” always alert to conquer.
The rest of the cast provide distinct characterizations as well, including Jennifer Phipps with a deliciously shaped delivery of her few lines. On William Schmuck’s lushly brown inlay set, robustly brown with many details under Kevin Lamotte’s warm lighting, the Essendine studio is a rich, relaxing, cozy place, although, when things get hectic, Joanna comments that she feels she’s in a “French farce.” And we believe her.
TROUBLE IN TAHITI
Trouble In Tahiti opens with a young man and young woman dancing to keyboard, bass, drums, and woodwind, dancing a barefoot slow dance in silence and suggestive of elegance. Then an alarm clock breaks the dream and an eight person chorus, all in 50’s semi-formal black, move about stylishly in toe tapping tempo and sing of “a little white house” before they form a human backdrop to the couple’s domestic unhappiness. Example one: “This coffee is burnt”…“ Make it yourself,” and what of hubby’s relationship with his secretary Miss Brown? “You live your life and I’ll live mine” shows a marriage in decline. Money is an issue and she is seeing an analyst.
Throughout we sense a painful aloofness in intimate marital space. Dinah and Sam convey the individual pain in a marital standoff, each one full of regret, suspicion, sadness, longing and loss. Their conversations are full of futile suggestions about getting together and broken hearted solutions. At one point Dinah finds herself at “a terrible awful movie” of escapist drivel. Sam at one point stands in a locker room full of “men who can make it and men who cannot” for in his cut throat world of achievement, “men are created unequal.”
With Linda Garneau’s close quarter chorography and its compact gestures that seem broad and big, the crowd scenes in Trouble in Tahiti do indeed feel commuter crowded. The office is all business smiles, and the analyst’s couch opens the door for dreams and memories. In turn, Elodie Gillet as Dinah sings her lyrics with aching purity up high, with a suggestion of weeping within all her range. Hers is a voice of piercing brightness, sophisticated sparkle, and very human vulnerability. Mark Uhre’s subtly encapsulates Sam, a victim of the career jungle and inwardly emotional, with the complexity of many emotions written all over his face. He bitterly sings “the winner must pay through his nose” because his good life isn’t good anymore.
Bernstein’s score provides a sense of musical and lyrical progression that feels like a heart making wistful commentary on itself. The music tends to inhabit the higher range, with a dramatically compelling juxtaposition of up tempo lifestyle commentary and gentler and more personal duets and solos. Bernstein effectively uses a blending of vocal lines that echo or respond to one another, lines that also give in to his undeniable musical momentum, one that is both rhythmic and stylish. His characterizes both the psychological makeup of individuals and the atmosphere of scenes precisely and shows a mastery of the musical as an idiom. Add director Jay Turvey’s instinct for theatrical effect, and an impressive cast that wins and breaks hearts, and this noon hour offering is special.