Canada's great theater center, the Shaw Festival, produced a 2010 opening week of plays that virtually repeated the pattern of their 2009 season: starting with an expectedly sure-fire couple of standards that were worse than disappointing and ending the week with two tough shows that were triumphs. I should say that the current ones are triumphs. Despite their familiarity, you will be happy to see Shawfest's pleasing revival of Mary Chase's enduringly delightful Harvey, the comedy about a haunting pookah you can imagine without a hookah, and Clare Boothe Luce's delicious 1936 concentration of estrogen-fueled bitchery, The Women, played stylishly, but undated in its insights and produced with gorgeous new designs.
I'll get around to describing the somewhat tedious and very peculiarly garbed revival of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, and the terrible translation of Chekhov's great classic, The Cherry Orchard, that foolishly attempts to make that most Russian play into a gelded mishmash about Ireland. But let's start the season's reports with Shawfest's surprising, rich revival of the rarely seen musical, One Touch of Venus.
The show originally combined an entirely brilliant mix of great talents with vastly differing styles. Central to its creation was the great composer Kurt Weill who wanted to make a score for the script of a play about the goddess Venus coming to life in New York City during World War II. The program notes emphasize the extreme diversity of styles of music that Weill employed here, "paying tribute" to previous great popular-music composers and influencing the best that followed.
Groundbreaking innovator Agnes DeMille ["Rodeo," Oklahoma!, Carousel] choreographed; revolutionary dramatic powerhouse Elia Kazan [Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, "On the Waterfront"] directed.
America's zaniest nonsense humorist S. J. Perelman and our most famous playful poet Ogden Nash collaborated on the book, and Nash wrote the lyrics [some were by Weill]. It was conceived as a work for the Broadway debut of an icon of European mature glamour and sophistication, Marlene Dietrich, but it opened with, and made a star of, an icon of American girlish sweetness, Mary Martin. I don't know whether any two of those glittering elements organically go together, but the show has never entirely made sense, nor ever been a unified work of art; yet at best, it has dazzled with more conglomerate wit, beauty and invention than almost any other musical comedy. So it's a pleasure to report that Shaw Festival's current production generally does the show justice and is admirably bright good fun.
I really think choreographer Michael Lichtefeld pulled this show together. With witty, dramatic and stylish emphasis and an extraordinary discipline, he made these actors and singers all look like beautifully rehearsed, professionally trained dancers. Whatever the mad variety of their moments in design, drama or style, the whole cast worked together throughout to put an exclamation mark at the end of every number's movement; and every bit of it looked unforced and easy. Dramatic effectiveness and meaning might have been arguable at times, but Broadway-musical pizzazz was always a given.
I wish I could say the same about the acting. Its pizzazz was more George M. Cohan than Cole Porter, and this show's strongpoint is wit.
Robin Evan Willis is certainly pretty enough to play Venus, and she sings well, if harshly; but she does not yet seem sufficiently accomplished in comedy or romantic magnetism to tackle this legendary sex goddess. I could appreciate only what she was trying to do. Ditto Mark Uhre as the dynamic Whitelaw Savory: he has the looks and the strong voice but not the potent leading-man presence.
Some of the lesser roles need work too, but most of the large cast, especially Neil Barclay and Jay Turvey, lend expert support. Fortunately, in the almost-equal secondary lead roles, Kyle Blair as the nerdy male ingénue and Deborah Hay as the classic mousey assistant who blossoms [the cliche` usually requires her to take off her glasses] start out appealing and build to show-stopping.
Ryan deSouza's musical direction is first-rate, strengthened by Paul Sportelli's orchestrations and conducting; and for all their variety and perhaps uneven greatness, I was delighted to hear every one of Weill's songs. Camellia Koo's sets are sometimes a bit less interesting than they might be, though Bonnie Beecher's lighting gives them a lift.
Michael Gianfrancesco's inventive costumes, possibly excepting Venus's main gown, are eye-opening and often zany and eccentric. And if director Eda Holmes seems to lack a centrally controlling hand, she gets enough right to make this rare revival a pleasure.
