Brief Encounter, based on Noel Coward's short play, Still Life, and David Lean's memorable 1945 film, leaves its black-and-white imprint and becomes a Crayola homage of music, laughter and flying sequences, in its current production at Studio 54.
Adapted and directed by Emma Rice, the piece is fabulously theatrical and surrounded by as much show-biz pizzazz as you can get. Rice brings in film projections, songs, dances, puppets and a lively cast led by Tristan Sturrock (Alec) and Hannah Yelland (Laura). Yet, Rice shows a serious intent and respect for the work. At the core, there is a central link back to that romantic intimacy that World War II-era films did so well, with Rachmaninoff's sweeping score, star-struck lovers and trains passing in the night. Gimmicks, yes, distractions, yes, but there's that irresistible unfulfilled romance, and it all fits like a storybook puzzle.
Brief Encounter, one of the September shows opening the 2010-2011 Broadway season, is pure entertainment, and it's a treat. The time is 1938 in a train station tea room. Laura, a conventional, married suburban mother, is waiting for her train to Milford when an ash flies in her eye. Fortunately, a doctor, Alec, also married, is in the station and he removes the ash. Gratefulness leads quickly to attraction and zooms into passion. They plan meetings that become rendezvous. At the end, their encounter is intense, and as the title states, brief. The era, the morality of the middle-class, guilt and circumstance battle effectively against passion. The ending is heartbreakingly dramatic but inevitable.
What sets this production apart from Coward's play and the later film is Emma Rice's enhancement of the romance with surrounding stories and somewhat outlandish, robust characters. Annette McLaughlin (Myrtle) and Dorothy Atkinson (Beryl) work in the train tea room and enjoy their own dalliances. Unlike the middle-class staidness, sassy Myrtle, with her blonde upsweep hairdo, joins swaggering stationmaster Albert (Joseph Alessi) in carefree, hungry lust, dancing and catching moments to duck behind the counter.
Alessi plays both Albert and Laura's surprisingly understanding husband, Fred. Myrtle's assistant, young, tiny Beryl is in the throngs of discovering the introduction to first love with lean, lanky cigarette vendor, Stanley (Gabriel Ebert). Beryl's rendition of "Mad About the Boy" is comically sensuous.
Other Noel Coward songs are performed by the cast/onstage combo. Notable is, "Go Slow, Johnny," tenderly rendered as Laura and Alec are drowning in the temptation of their passion.
The audience is lightly brought into the play before the show, when cast members wander up the aisles entertaining the audience. The actors playing Alec and Laura are seated in the front row and walk up to the stage only for their scenes.
Sound designer, Simon Baker, provides sweeps of wind, bending Laura and Alec backwards in moments of passion. Neil Murray's fantasy set design allows Alec and Laura to "enter" the train in the film sequences with projections are by Gemma Carrington and Jon Driscoll. As their faces are zoomed larger, Laura's grief at the end is especially compelling. Murray's well-detailed 1940's costume designs further merge illusion and reality.
Admittedly, the romance so loved by fans of the film is vastly diluted here, yet this production has a charm of its own with its fresh interpretation of a short, unfulfilled intensity of two lives stunted by circumstances. While the recurring theme of Laura and Alec's passion is out of the proportion to the rowdy theatrics surrounding it, it has a tangible and lingering poignancy.
