Two Greats

by Kirk Woodward

[In a recent play report, I wrote of “one of those rare occurrences in theater: the perfect alignment of role and actor” (see my report on Will Eno’s Wakey, Wakey, posted on 24 March).  Well, my friend, and frequent contributor to this blog, Kirk Woodward has just had two versions of that experience: two actors he considers great in roles for which they are uniquely suited.  Curiously, while both performances are of generally equal quality, the plays in which the actors are appearing are not; the ensembles within which the two great performances are embedded, however, are both uneven.   I’ll let Kirk tell you the rest himself and you can decide whether or not you agree with his assessments.  ~Rick]

Theories about theater, and in particular about acting, can be complicated. I’ve added to the complications myself, I’m sure, in various pieces I’ve written for this blog. But when it comes down to it, much of the best of theater comes down to this: a great performer in a great role. I’ve seen two instances of this phenomenon recently: Kevin Kline in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, and Bette Midler in the musical Hello, Dolly!

Noel Coward (1899-1973) wrote Present Laughter in 1939, as England was buckling down for war. In fact the onset of the war made it impossible to stage the play then. By 1942 the situation had changed; Coward, who had first wanted to work for British Intelligence and in fact had done so briefly in France, now found it his duty (urged on by Winston Churchill himself) to provide entertainment and refreshment for a nation under bombardment by Germany. 

He put together a tour of his plays called Play Parade, consisting of the colossally successful Blithe Spirit (1941), This Happy Breed (1939), and Present Laughter. In his diary (published in 2000 by Phoenix Press as The Noel Coward Diaries) he writes:

War news pretty grim.Stalingrad apparently taken. [It was not seized by the Nazis, ultimately, but at great cost.] I must admit to a personal apathy now regarding the war. I have tried from the beginning to work constructively for the war effort and now, having been driven back to my own métier, the theatre, I cannot work myself up about it any more. This may be sheer escapism, but if I can make people laugh, etc., maybe I am not doing so badly. I only know that to sit at the side of the stage amid the old familiar sights and sounds and smells is really lovely after all this long time. The things that matter to me at the moment are whether or not I was good in such and such a scene and if the timing was right and my make-up not too pale. This is my job really, and will remain so through all wars and revolutions and carnage.

Present Laughter perfectly embodies Coward’s attitude. It is a play about theater. The leading character, Garry Essendine, is a self-obsessed actor of comedic roles, surrounded by a household dedicated to taking care of his whims, none of which he is reticent about expressing, often at the top of his voice. His conversation is mostly about himself and his dreadful struggles as he attempts to share his art with a world that somehow cannot fully appreciate him. We meet his secretary, his ex-wife, his producer, his housekeeper, his valet, his manager, and two outsiders—a particularly persistent female admirer, a very possibly insane young playwright—and Garry’s producer’s glamorous wife, who seems determined to seduce nearly every man she comes in contact with, particularly Garry.

The result is a boisterous farce. Coward played the self-referential lead role himself in the first production (and in one in 1958 in the United States), and he admittedly based the play on his own Noel-centered household, with the prominent qualification that Garry appears to be heterosexual, which Coward was not. In any case, clearly the play is a romp, a trifle . . . except that, I would claim, it is not trivial at all, in the sense that the play, like most of Coward’s work, is a meditation on a theme: in a world of chaos and confusion, how can we manage to live with each other? This question underlies much of comedy, and certainly much of Coward’s, and gives what I would call a subliminal significance to an apparently carefree evening in the theater.

The current revival of Present Laughter on Broadway, which opened at the St. James Theatre on 5 April 2017, was directed by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel. It was generally received by the throwing of hats in the air for Kevin Kline’s highly physical performance, and moderately less enthusiasm for the play, with an overall score of 79 on Show-score.com and a critic’s rating of 7.6 out of 10 on Broadwayworld.com.

Among the less than enthusiastic reviews, Mark Shenton in The Stage (5 April 2017) wrote that Present Laughter “feels lugubrious and weighty rather than effortless. Our taste for the kind of theatrical vanity encapsulated by Essendine has long waned and it seems incongruous that his theatre career could support such a large permanent staff, including housekeeper, valet and secretary, or allow his house to look like Victoria station, with so many people coming and going.” This strikes me as the kind of comment that could be made about nearly any period farce, including for example a number of masterpieces by Georges Feydeau (1862-1921).

Similarly Alexis Soloski in The Guardian (5 April 2017) said that Kevin Kline gives “a performance of stupefying charm that reveals some of the wrinkles and sag in the surrounding play.” Garry Essendine would suffer for months over a comment like that.

In most other precincts the reviews were particularly enthusiastic about the performance of Kevin Klein, which had been eagerly awaited, and they were similar to the point that I can quote a few as typical. Ben Brantley in The New York Times (all the reviews quoted were posted on line on 5 April 2017) called the production “uneven” but said that Kevin Kline gives “a paradoxically natural performance as a man for whom the histrionic gesture is a conditioned reflex. Every move he makes turns genuine emotions into a pose, which doesn’t discount the authenticity of the flickering melancholy within.” On the other hand, Brantley feels the production works too hard, emphasizing “the more boisterous aspects of Coward’s comedy, occasionally to hilarious, but just as often labored, ends. And the pace needs to be picked up throughout.”

But Matt Windman in amNewYork says that Kline “is careful not to overplay the comedy, with the intention of giving a fully rounded performance,” and Linda Winer in Newsday seems to agree: “this is a revival that, despite a cast of farce experts, treats the broad moments as rare offhand treats that flash suddenly on characters as momentary glimpses into humanity’s silliness.” Comedy, we note again, is a matter of taste. What is trivial to one may be significant to another, as illustrated by Jesse Green’s review in Vulture/New York magazine, which I quote at more length because he also agrees with my response to the rest of the cast:

The scene in which [Essendine] finally calls out the sexual subterfuges of his comrades—and definitively rids himself of his own extraneous women—successfully counterweights the play’s many trivialities. Most of the rest of the cast, under the direction of Moritz von Stuelpnagel, seems to have got the same memo: Play the problems, not the jokes. I was especially impressed with the women. Cobie Smulders, a star of How I Met Your Mother making her Broadway debut as Joanna, not only looks sensational in gowns by Susan Hilferty but finds a core of valor in a typically odious character. Kate Burton—who played the ingénue Daphne opposite George C. Scott in 1982—brings exceptional clarity and warmth to Liz, who can sometimes come off as a scold. And Kristine Nielsen is hilarious as the trusty secretary [Monica Reed].

My own opinions, for what they are worth, are that Coward’s plays are frequently misinterpreted because reviewers often cannot see beyond their own preconceptions, and that a comic performance like Kevin Kline’s is a connection to the greatness of theater that must be celebrated. Every moment of his performance is a tribute to the ability of the theater to astonish us in unexpected ways. His actor’s creativity is completely invested in the service of the play. The word “great” can be used in such occasions.

I referred above to Kevin Kline’s performance as “eagerly awaited,” and those words hardly describe the anticipation for Bette Midler’s performance as Dolly Levi in the musical Hello, Dolly! (book by Michael Stewart, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, originally on Broadway from 1964 to 1970 for 2,844 performances) which opened on 20 April 2017 at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre in Manhattan.

I saw the show at a preview performance on 21 March 2017; I arrived early, at about 7:30 PM, for an 8:00 PM performance, and saw to my amazement the line to enter the theater already stretched out of the theater, across Shubert Alley, and down the next block for hundreds of feet in each direction. The line, please note, was made up of people who already had tickets. Their seats were assigned! But they had to get in the theater. Bette was doing Dolly! The enthusiasm continued throughout the show. It was part performance, part celebration.

I admire Bette Midler greatly. I first saw her twice in her Clams on the Half Shell revue in 1975, an experience that those of us who saw it will not forget. Her combination of singing, comedy, and acting talent was overwhelming. As a performer she could turn on a dime, going from shameless sentimentality to the crudest bawdiness in seconds flat.

She had first performed on Broadway in the role of Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof from 1966 to 1969; she was back in 2013 as the agent Sue Mengers in the one person show I’ll Eat You Last at the Booth Theatre, in a successful production that I somehow managed to miss, for reasons I’ll never understand. She recorded fourteen studio albums, was nominated for an Oscar twice, and generally kept herself busy. But she had never played the lead in a Broadway musical until Dolly.

I would think that it would take a star of Midler’s magnitude to make a Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! a success today. It is impossible now to listen to Jerry Herman’s score without an awareness of the enormous changes that Steven Sondheim brought to the musical in songs that develop character while moving the stories along—sometimes they are the stories. The songs in Dolly are songs, attractive and often memorable but, with rare exceptions, not dramatic in themselves, and my impression is that in today’s theater they feel simply unsatisfactory.  [Kirk has discussed some of his conclusions about show songs in “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” posted to Rick On Theater on 2 October 2011.]

The book of the musical is based on Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker (1954), based on an earlier play by Wilder called The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), in turn based on Johann Nestroy’s play Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen (“He’ll Have Himself a Good Time,” 1842, successfully adapted in 1981 by Tom Stoppard as On the Razzle), which in turn—we’re at the end of the list now—was based on a one-act play by John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent (1835). The Matchmaker had a respectable run on Broadway, but none of the iterations of the story is generally considered a masterpiece, including The Matchmaker, which although written by the author of Our Town, is seldom performed today. (Eric Bentley, reviewing The Matchmaker in The New Republic in 1954, wrote that “I agree for once in my life with the dramatic critic of The New York Post who spoke of Mr. Wilder as teacher being jolly with the class.”)

So Dolly is not based on sensational material, the way that, say, My Fair Lady was based on Shaw’s Pygmalion. My conclusion is that today Hello, Dolly! needs a star in order to succeed, and in Bette Midler it has one. The reviews for Dolly have been overwhelmingly favorable, with a critics’ rating of 86 out of 100 on Show-score.com. The only negative review I saw was by Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal (20 April 2017, like all the reviews quoted here), who appears to have seen a different show than I did. Teachout writes, “Ms. Midler’s singing voice is in a desperate, sometimes shocking state of disrepair . . . . As for the rest of the performance, Ms. Midler doesn’t even bother to act . . . .She can’t dance and isn’t funny . . . . David Hyde Pierce is all wrong as Horace . . . . What’s more, he and Ms. Midler have no romantic chemistry at all, which makes the show even less dramatically plausible . . . . Every supporting performance is a grotesque caricature . . . . As for the musical numbers, they’re camped up to the hilt.”

I can only say that my impressions were different. At the performance I saw, I felt that Midler was not using her full vocal power; she is 71 years old, the role is strenuous, and she’d be foolish to blow out her voice at the start of a run. She had plenty of power for everything she wanted to do. Far from “not bothering to act,” I felt that acting was exactly what Midler was doing—she was giving us a character named Dolly Levi, not a star named Bette Midler. (Perhaps that is why Teachout felt her voice was ragged—because she was, so to speak, singing in character?)

Dancing is only minimally required for the role of Dolly and is supplied, as was traditional in the musical of the time, by others. Midler’s comic timing is magnificent—she wastes no lines, and gets the most out of each of them. David Hyde Pierce is not Walter Matthau (who did the role of Horace Vandergelder opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1969 film adaptation), but then no one else is. Pierce is of course a comic master and brings his own arched eyebrow style of performing to a not terribly exhilarating role. And I felt that the production as a whole, far from being grotesque or camped, stuck to its obvious aim of doing a show from 1964 as it would have been done then if the entire production were sprightly and first-rate.

Aside from Mr. Teachout, the reviewers and I almost all agree. I will let Joe Dziemianowicz’s review in The New York Daily News stand for many: “A dazzling revival . . . this show’s all about Dolly . . . . It’s a role made for personality. And Midler has that—and then some . . . . Type out all the superlatives you can because nights like this in the theater—in which tingles continue from overture to final bow—make you feel overjoyed. That is a tonic for troubled times!” Righto.

As I mentioned, I saw the show at a preview performance, which featured one of those episodes that endear such early peeks to their audiences. David Hyde Pierce, onstage early in the show with a big drum, waited for the set to change, but it did not. A voice came over the loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing mechanical difficulties with the set. We hope to resume shortly.” Pierce did a small double-take and marched offstage. After a pause, the stage began to change its configuration, at first slowly, then with increasing speed, until the next set was in place. Pierce marched back on stage and said to the audience, “Anyway . . .” And continued with the scene.

Moments like that technical malfunction cheer me up, because they are reminders that even on Broadway, with its astonishing technical resources, what’s happening on the stage is that live human beings are doing what live human beings do, as well as they can. God bless theater. We need it. We realize just how much we need it when exceptional performers like Kline and Midler take part in it. There are other ways that theater can achieve greatness, but from time immemorial, one of the most splendid of those ways is to put great performers on the stage and let them work.

“Great” is a subjective term, of course, but when an individual performer brings to a role a combination of intelligence, imagination, daring, and personal magnetism that lifts the experience of a play into the realm of the unforgettable—as, for me, both Kline and Midler do—surely “great” isn’t too large a word.

[I used to keep a list of the best individual performances I’d seen.  I don’t keep the list anymore—it was only in my head anyway—but Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) was on it; so was James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope (1968), Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity (1966), Stacy Keach in Indians (1969), Alec McCowen in Hadrian VII (1969), Ben Vereen in Pippin (1972), Virginia Capers in Raisin (1973), Jim Dale in Scapino! (1974), Henry Fonda in Clarence Darrow (1974), Anthony Hopkins in Equus (1974), Donald Sinden in London Assurance (1974), Meryl Streep in A Memory of Two Mondays/27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1976), Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy together in The Gin Game (1977), and Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (1979).  (I’ve seen two or three recent performances that I’d add if I still kept the list.  Michael Emerson in Wakey, Wakey would be one, and probably Jefferson Mays’s turn as seven murder victims in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder in 2014.)]  

'Design for Living' (Shaw Festival, 2006)

[Following Kirk Woodward’s interesting discussion of Noel Coward, focusing on Private Lives ("Noel, Noel," 24 March), I thought it would be fun to look back at a recent Coward show I’d seen. Below is a report I wrote on a production of Design for Living, a play Kirk mentions several times in his article. My report is excerpted from a longer article on the Shaw Festival, and I’ve edited it some to make it readable not only on its own but to an audience six years after I wrote it (verb tenses and that sort of thing, you know). I hope ROT’s readers will find this look back at something from my archives at least amusing if not actually informative.

[In August 2006, I took a trip up to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, for the annual Shaw Festival. The Round House Theatre of Bethesda and Silver Spring, Maryland, to which my mother used to subscribe, sponsored the trip bi-annually (in alternate years, they went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival), and they made all the arrangements from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Niagara-on-the-Lake (about an hour’s drive north of Buffalo, New York) and back. The Round House reserved six shows (High Society, the 1997 stage adaptation of the 1956 film musicalization of Philip Barry's 1939 Philadelphia Story; Arthur Miller’s The Crucible; Ruth and Augustus Goetz's The Heiress, adapted in 1947 from Henry James's 1881 Washington Square; Shaw’s Arms and the Man; Michael O'Brien’s The Invisible Man, the première of the festival-commissioned 2006 stage adaptation of H. G. Wells's 1897 novel; and Shaw’s Too True To Be Good), but several afternoons and most mornings were free if anyone wanted to add performances. I selected two additional shows to make a total of eight performances out of the season's offering of ten plays.

[I wanted to see Design for Living, so I booked the Coward and Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. I'd always rather see an Ibsen than some unknown, less-than-intriguing quantity, snobbish as that may seem. Some years ago, one of the theaters off Union Square in New York did a multi-year series of all of Ibsen's plays in chronological order in good-quality showcase-level productions, and I tried to catch any that I'd never seen before. But I’d seen Rosmersholm over five years earlier, so I figured this would be a good chance to see another staging with better production values—and it was. (The plays I omitted were a pair of Chekhov one-acts, The Bear/Brute and The Marriage Proposal, under the umbrella title Love Among the Russians; and a new play, Lillian Groag's 1997 The Magic Fire, set in the immediate post-World War II years in Argentina.)]

I did a private reading (a bunch of actors sitting around in someone's living room) of Noel Coward’s Design for Living many years ago, and I've seen the considerably bowdlerized 1933 flick (Cary Grant, Frederic March, Miriam Hopkins), but I'd never seen the play—and I figured a Coward would be fun, assuming the Shaw Festival cast can pull off his comedy-of-manners style—which they did, wonderfully. One characteristic of the acting at the Shaw, which I think must be a unique attribute of Canadian actors, is that they can shift back and forth pretty successfully and easily—or, at least, convincingly (for the most part)—between American characters and Brits. They did well with both the Barry-Porter-Kopit upper-class Long Islanders of High Society, the 17th-century Massachusetts settlers of Salem in The Crucible, and the 19th-century New Yorkers of The Heiress. Then they also nailed Coward's toffs in Design as well as the denizens of small-town England in The Invisible Man. These were often the same actors crossing over from one show to another and they also handled the shifts from Cowardy and Shavian comedy to the heavy drama of Crucible and Rosmersholm, not to mention the melodrama of Heiress. This isn't something American can't do, of course, but we don't tend to do it very much in our theater since this kind of rep isn't common here—outside of college theaters, I guess.

Our first matinee at the Shaw was Design at the Royal George Theatre in town. The Royal George is a converted movie theater that had been built originally as a vaudeville house for entertaining the troops of World War I. It's a proscenium stage and seats about 330 spectators in an orchestra and a balcony, all painted in red and gilt—a little gem of an old-fashioned theater. (The festival used to stage all its musical shows here until 2006. Why it took them so long to realize that the musicals were certainly the most popular performances and they could sell over twice as many tickets in the big, 856-seat Festival Theatre as in the Royal George, I'll never understand. Also, if they weren't going to do musicals in the Festival Theatre, why put in an orchestra pit when they built it in 1973?) I had booked the seats on line, so I didn't check the lay-out and seat location, and we ended up in the last two seats on the house-left corner of the last row of the balcony; Mother said they were the best seats she's ever had. (Mom's small, and she always complains that whenever she goes to a theater—movie or play—tall people always sit in front of her!) After two American plays at the Shaw, this was our first British entry (despite the fact that Coward wrote it for the Lunts). As I already said, the actors handled the British characters as well as they managed the American ones before—and nicely negotiated Coward's light comedy style as well as any British cast (who are usually past masters at this kind of toss-away dialogue and repartee; Americans can be clumsy at it). All in all, it was a thoroughly delightful performance in all respects. Like Crucible (and, it turned out, all the Shaw presentations), this was an ensemble performance, and the three main actors—Nicole Underhay as Gilda, Graeme Somerville as Otto, and David Jansen (no, not that one—he’s Janssen, and he's dead) as Leo, the role Coward wrote for himself—created a bizarre, but totally believable ménage. (Coward created a bizarre relationship; the actors carried it off believably.) Underhay, by the way (pardon the rhyme), has a wonderfully husky voice, à la Blythe Danner.

The set design (by Ken MacDonald) was striking (a phenomenon I’d noted across the festival). Charlotte Dean's costumes weren't bad, either—especially Gilda's slinky, white satin evening dress of the last act. Looks like something Lauren Bacall might have worn! Design is a three-acter and each act is set in a different apartment: Otto's garret studio in Paris, Leo's London flat, and Ernest and Gilda's swank apartment in New York. Though the furnishings changed for each set, from shabby, eclectic clutter of the poor painter to the upholstered middle-class solidity of the newly-affluent playwright to the airy, ultra-modern starkness of the wealthy art dealer and his famous decorator wife, the back "wall" of the various apartments was the same. It was an expressionistic sculpture of a black metal lattice, an eccentrically curving backdrop with an equally asymmetrical balcony door: Dr. Seuss on acid. I'm guessing that this was the visual representation of the life-and-living arrangements of the focal trio. (The fact that the backdrop didn't change suggested the visceral connection among the three occupants. They may move up and out individually, but they remain attached.) The third element of the set was the background outside the apartment, the "view" from the balcony. It, too, was wildly curved and misshapen, a cityscape centering on one landmark that identifies each city: Paris's Eiffel Tower, London's Big Ben, and New York's Chrysler Building These were also distorted in a Seussian manner. (Maybe Salvador Dali is a clearer image—though he's certainly too heavy for Coward.)

The furniture, props, and costumes of Design were all perfectly Realistic, as was the acting (in a Cowardy vein, of course) Only the backdrops—a kind of one-dimensional frame, if you will—was otherwise: one significant element was stylistically opposed to the basically Realistic unit. I suppose MacDonald might have been depicting, in sort of a reverse image, the way that Gilda, Otto, and Leo's world seems perfectly normal from the inside—from where they see it—but is crazily skewed as viewed from outside the relationship. It was reversed, since in the set, we seemed to be inside in the "normal" world looking out at the "crazy" one, as if we were living inside the Gilda-Otto-Leo mindset.

The program didn't specify in what years director Morris Panych put Design for the Shaw's production, and the costumes, except for those of act three, weren't particularly period-specific. The furniture of acts one and two could have been from any time "long ago" without indicating any specific decade. But the pieces in act three, in the apartment Gilda’s furnished after she’s become a high-society decorator, should probably be markedly art deco. They were demonstrably "modern"; however, they looked more like ‘50s stuff than ‘30s. Mother insisted that the production isn't even set in the 1930s, but I put this down to either a design error or a deliberate effort by MacDonald to muddle the period. Only because the design work in the production was so striking did this stick out—it wasn't significant to the production in any other way. (There was one actual anachronism in the design, though. Only a New Yorker would probably have noticed it, however. In the last scene, set in New York City at night, the Chrysler Building's spire was lit up. Either MacDonald didn't know, or knew and decided to overlook for the sake of the effect, that the lights in the Chrysler's crown had been installed, but because construction was completed at the start the Depression, they were never illuminated. Over time, the building's management forgot the lights were there until a renovation led to their rediscovery. Only in 1981, for the first time since the building opened in 1930, was the famous art deco spire of the Chrysler Building lit up.)

What interested me most in the this staging, though, was the casting—and it was an element of the Shaw in general it seemed. The fact that I noticed this shouldn't suggest that it affected me in any way—the fact that it didn't is my point. Neither Graeme Somerville nor David Jansen are matinee idols, yet they were cast as characters who are presented as inescapably attractive to Gilda, a woman who’s supposed to be desired by all men who meet her! (The same casting decision didn't seem to hold for the women, by the way—the actresses were all as attractive as their characters. I don't know what that says—maybe the Canadians are as sexist as the rest of us.) I guess I like this apparent practice because I was never a Leading Man myself, and the notion that we ordinary folks can still play those parts pleases me. (I did have an acting teacher who told me I should go out for what he called "the sex-pot roles." Right! Like any director would actually have considered me for them. Although, I did once play Chance Wayne, a role originated by Paul Newman, in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth—much to my mother's consternation—but those were peculiar circumstances.) By the way, I never heard anyone in the audience remark on this casting.

[Just to provide a brief overview of the Shaw Festival: It was started in 1962 by Brian Doherty, a local lawyer and theater enthusiast, as a "Salute to Shaw." Its first productions, performed by local amateurs, were in a disused courthouse (in 2006, the site of the black box Court House Theatre, one of the festival's three performance venues). It quickly attracted both critical and financial attention and became a companion to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, two-and-a-half hours west, which was launched (with more professional intentions) in 1953. (There is, in fact, a third theater festival in Canada, the Charlottetown Festival on Prince Edward Island, devoted to "new Canadian musicals." I didn't know there were Canadian musicals, much less new ones!) The Shaw is considered one of the two largest repertory companies in North America—the other being, obviously, the Stratford Festival.

[The Shaw runs from April through October and November—some shows opening later and others closing earlier. (I understand from the locals we chatted with in the shops and around town that the weather in Niagara-on-the-Lake is awful in the late fall and winter—cold, rainy, windy, and gray. Except for Christmas, when there's another influx of tourists, it's pretty bleak in the off-season.) Like most traditional theaters, the festival is dark on Mondays, but during the performance week there are at least two shows a day at all three theaters, and often—I'm not sure it's not also every performance day—an 11:30 a.m. "lunchtime" performance. That comes to 36-54 performances a week (I did the math); you can figure out how many shows a season that makes. (There are also script readings, poetry and song presentations, discussions, chats, workshops, lectures, and demonstrations going on many days as well. These folks keep busy.) The festival is a true seasonal rep: no play is performed twice in a row, which means some theaters change productions three times a day. Most actors are in two plays (a few are in only one; no one I could spot was in more than two), and there's no apparent attempt to consider which theater houses which show when it comes to casting. The theaters are strung out along Queen Street in Niagara-on-the-Lake: the little Court House and the Royal George are only a couple of blocks apart in "downtown"; the Festival Theatre is a few blocks east on Queen's Parade, an extension of the main drag. (Nothing in Niagara-on-the-Lake is all that far away from anything else. On afternoons when we didn't see a matinee, Mother and I walked around most of the town and its immediate environs.) The company comprises some 60 actors (directors and designers, as well as other artists such as composers, are hired individually for each show), but all don't appear every season; about 30 or so work each year, and they are on contract for the season. Many actors live in Niagara-on-the-Lake now and consider the Shaw their permanent artistic base, doing other work like films and TV (all those U.S. TV programs that are taped in Toronto and Vancouver are in many of the company's credits) as well as other stage work from time to time, but returning to the Shaw regularly. Some of the actors in 2006 were in their fourth or fifth season in Niagara-on-the-Lake, but others were into double digits. (The other artists also come back year after year, but they aren't part of the permanent company.) Loyalty from both sides—the current artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, was in her fourth season in 2006 and continues to work with artists who started at the Shaw before her arrival—is clearly an attribute of this community. The actors who live in Niagara-on-the-Lake have bought homes and are raising families there.

[The Shaw Festival mandate, as they call it, is to showcase the plays of GBS and his contemporaries. (I don't know if the idea when the festival was originally conceived was to restrict itself to Shaw's plays only, but the inclusion of plays "written in Shaw's lifetime" has been part of the concept for decades, in any case.) Considering that GBS lived almost a century (1856-1950; the festival celebrated his sesquicentennial earlier the year I was there), the definition of "contemporary" leaves a lot of leeway—and covers a lot of territory stylistically! In 2000, the festival expanded its mandate to include plays written about the period of GBS's lifetime, so now they do modern plays set in that almost-century. The 2006 season included two Shaws—which I gather is the practice—plus an Ibsen (1828-1906) and a pair of Chekhovs (1860-1904). Also coming, I suppose, in the category of plays by GBS contemporaries (though at the end of his century) were the Noel Coward (1899-1973) and the Arthur Miller (1915-2005). (I'm guessing that's Crucible's "in," since it isn't "about" Shaw's lifetime—even McCarthyism really started after GBS's death—and was written three years after GBS died. It's kind of a stretch, I guess—a policy evidently known as "Jackie's elastic mandate.") Two adaptations from novels could go either way—the source material is contemporary to GBS and the setting is, consequently, of that period, too, though the adaptations are much later. The Heiress was adapted from James's 1881 novel in 1947, which would barely qualify as "Shaw's lifetime," but the story is set in 1850. The Invisible Man, from an 1897 novel, qualifies because the modern play is set within GBS's life. The other new play, The Magic Fire, is set in 1950s, barely fitting into GBS's life span. Of the final entry of the 2006 bill, Cole Porter's High Society, the source material, the 1939 Philip Barry play, fits into the Shaw life span, but the qualification is again the setting: 1930's Long Island (the musical having been transferred from Philadelphia's Main Line for reasons comprehensible only in Hollywood).]

Noel, Noel

by Kirk Woodward

[Once again, my friend Kirk Woodward comes up with an interesting perspective on a familiar topic, this time the recently closed Broadway revival of Private Lives and its author, Noel Coward. I’ve known that Kirk has great admiration for Coward as a playwright—we’ve discussed both the writer’s merits and Kirk’s fondness for his work and interest in his life and career many times over the years—but what I didn’t know was that Kirk’s had those sentiments at least since we were in college together in the ‘60s. (For ROT readers who don’t already know the connection, Kirk and I were classmates at Washington and Lee University and met as participants in the university theater, Kirk a budding director and playwright and me a wannabe actor.) As you’ll see shortly, “Noel, Noel” had its origins that far back.

[It’s my practice, especially since I launched ROT almost three years ago now, to write a performance report on plays that I see. I’ve gotten Kirk to do his version of that occasionally (see “Race,” 3 May 2010, and “The Scottsboro Brecht,” 12 February 2011)—he’s even done a little performance reporting on musical events he’s attended (“The Beatles and Me,” 7 October 2010, and “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” 8 January 2011)—and when he told me he was going to be seeing Private Lives and might have an article on it and Coward, I expected his take on the performance report again. I had no idea he’d reach back into our youths and come up with a very perspicacious and informative consideration of Coward’s dramaturgy—even if he was a college kid at the time! (Who knew? We were just theater geeks, I thought! Still waters and all . . . .)

[Since there won’t be a plain old report on Private Lives, a play I rather like myself (though Blithe Spirit is my favorite Coward), I’ll fill in the bare details. The production opened at the Music Box Theatre for previews on 6 November 2011 and closed on December 31 after 12 previews and 53 regular performances. The revival, starring Paul Gross as Elyot and Kim Cattrall as Amanda, and directed by Sir Richard Eyre, was always intended as a limited run, but had been scheduled to run five weeks more. Of the production itself, which got mostly good reviews, Kirk wrote me:

Even for a funny, well-regarded show, it may be somewhat overexposed. And it’s not a show that lends itself to new and daring interpretation—you pretty much need to do Noel Coward’s Private Lives or do something else entirely. It was doing well enough in the holiday season, but the producers apparently didn’t see signs that that level of sales would continue once January arrived. In this economy, and with ticket prices as high as they are, there might not have been enough of a “hook” to let the show thrive after the holidays.

[In fact, that’s the explanation the producers offered, with one of them stating: “Despite fantastic reviews, ticket sales have been slower than we had hoped for and it would be irresponsible to continue running into the notoriously difficult January period.”

[So, have a look at Kirk’s elucidation of Noel Coward’s themes and ideas in his famously witty and seemingly light-hearted (not to say light-headed) plays. ~Rick]

In December 2011 my wife and I saw the latest Broadway revival of Noel Coward's comedy Private Lives. We wanted to see it because one of our favorite actors, Paul Gross, was playing Elyot, the male lead. Gross, a leading actor in Canada, also played the erratic theater festival director in the brilliant TV series Slings and Arrows, and the Mountie in the very entertaining TV series Due South, which was on U.S. television from 1994 to 1999. We also wanted to see the play because we'd heard that Kim Cattrall, best known as one of the four leads in Sex and the City, was outstanding in the role (she had played it in London, where this production originated, to acclaim), and she was.

But we also wanted to see it because Private Lives is a delightful play. It is continually revived; I saw it on Broadway in 1984 with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles. (I remember that I worried about how Burton would get through the more physical parts of the play – he was having a lot of back and neck trouble – and that I thought Taylor was quite good in the role.) Alan Rickman played Elyot in another Broadway revival in 2002, which I would love to have seen, and all in all the play has been produced on Broadway seven times.

What accounts for the longevity of Private Lives? The story is lively, the humor character-based and genuinely amusing, the action continuous. Most of all, though, the play was written by Noel Coward, which means it was written by one of the greatest playwrights of all time.

I hope that last sentence is sufficiently provocative. Coward certainly never made any such claims for himself; when one of his characters sings, in the song "If Love Were All," that "the most I've had / Is just a talent to amuse," one can't help hearing a reflection of Coward's own attitude toward his work. He was proud of what he wrote, but he made no claims for its immortality.

But who are the greatest playwrights of all time? Comparisons, as one of Shakespeare's characters says, are odorous, but it may be easier to see Coward's standing if we ignore the silly prejudice that comedy is trivial, and look at the members of the Playwriting Pantheon in two categories, Dramatic and Comedic. Who are the unquestionable leaders in each category? Granting that many playwrights have written many remarkable plays, I'd say that the unarguable Greats are the following:

DRAMATIC
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Shakespeare
Chekhov
Ibsen

COMEDIC
Aristophanes
Shakespeare (again)
Molière
Shaw
Coward

It's not a long list. Certainly it's open to argument. But whoever else you might put on your list, let me try to make the case a bit more that Coward belongs on it, not that I'm certain the case needs making any more. I'd like to call on my much younger self, in an article I wrote for Ariel, the student literary magazine of Washington and Lee University, in its Spring 1969 issue. I will present the article first, and then comment on it.

NOEL COWARD REVISITED

1.

Noel Coward's fifty-so plays typically present the British upper- or upper-middle class, usually aristocrats, artists, or bohemians: persons who project elaborate public images. Noel Coward also presents a public image: wit, sophisticate, possibly a playboy, carrying the scent of a declining or recently-vanished decadent society. Popular opinion assigns Coward's personality and plays a personality it borrows from the characters in his plays. The word is that Coward writes "sophisticated farces, comedies, and musicals." This opinion is mistaken in its assumptions, but difficult to refute, since it uses a kind of code. "Farces, comedies, and musicals" indicate light entertainment. "Sophisticated" means that Coward has nothing to say.

Some of Coward's plays, however, have established reputations on their own. The most produced of these plays is Private Lives, in which a divorced and separately remarried couple cannot help causing themselves and their new spouses trouble when they rent adjoining rooms at the same hotel on their honeymoons. Another well-known play, Design for Living, presents a curious love-triangle: three best friends, two men and a woman, who continually find out that no two of them can do without the third. Amateurs often do Tonight at 8:30, a collection of nine one-act plays arranged in sets of three. In Blithe Spirit (1942), a novelist who remarried after his first wife died inadvertently materializes his first wife's spirit during a séance, and the spirit willfully refuses to dematerialize. (Beatrice Lily and Tammy Grimes played in a recent musical version of this play, High Spirits, which Coward directed.) In Present Laughter (1947), an actor cannot determine which of the people around him are genuine and which of them are acting, while his friends wonder the same about him. Waiting in the Wings, produced in 1960, concerns aging women (The Wings is a British home for retired indigent actresses) trying to learn to accept their increasing old age.

2.

The first step in a proper evaluation of Coward's plays is to determine what kind of plays they are. They follow a pattern which is familiar to students of the modern drama. This pattern may be described using as an example Family Album, a play in Tonight at 8:30. This is the pattern: a closely-related group of people have an image of themselves, a claim to an identity (the family in Family Album acts properly; its members profess their respect and love for each other). At the moment the play begins, however, a crisis is also about to begin (father has just died and been buried and the will read), stirred by long-hidden resentments and desires (the relatives talk about distribution of property). Guilty secrets about the past come to light (father had a mistress, who went to his funeral) and the group attempts to obliterate the feeling of guilt by drinking, but liquor only sharpens the problem ("Papa liked wine – he liked it to excess – I expect this is hereditary"). At last something resembling the whole truth emerges (father wrote a will leaving all his money to his three mistresses; the butler burned the will with the relatives watching; the loving daughter hated and despised her father). The group, "guiltily awake" at last, finds a way of tolerating its knowledge (the butler says he is too deaf ever to hear a question about the will), but the illusory identity, the fiction of trust and honesty and innocence, is gone (as a character says, "This house was happy when there were children in it").

This pattern resembles that of Ibsen's later plays. Ibsen and Coward both begin their plays at a point where romantic illusions hover at the brink of collapse. Both playwrights see illusions about the past destroyed by confrontation with the real past. Coward's affinity with Ibsen is historically appropriate. Ibsen's spirit dominated the theater of Coward's youth; Bernard Shaw wrote his powerful book of introduction, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, less than thirty years before Coward wrote his first play.

The comparison with Ibsen holds even though Coward writes farces, as an examination of a Coward farce will reveal. Blithe Spirit concerns the clearly farcical situation of the ghost of a first wife returning to her now remarried husband. Even in this situation, however, the principle of the destruction of illusion, the unmasking of realities concealed by appearances, still operates. In Blithe Spirit, the "appearance” is the husband's happy remarriage after his first wife died. What is "unmasked" is his guilt over shifting his love so easily, claiming to love his second wife with body and soul while still retaining genuine feeling for the departed. The fun never overtakes the guilt which lies at the core of the play's action.

3.

Coward's plays "typically present the British upper- or upper-middle class, usually aristocrats, artists, or bohemians: persons who project extravagant public images." Aristocrats, artists, and bohemians depend on their public images: without a Character an aristocrat loses his influence, an actor loses his ability to create illusion, a bohemian loses his standing as an independent spirit. Coward's characters depend on their Characters. Elyot, the husband in Private Lives, overpowers his new and ex-wives by force of personality. Garry, the actor in Present Laughter, dominates the lives of his whole circle of intimates as well as the lives of many people he has never seen. Gilda, Otto, and Leo, the bohemians in Design for Living, form and reform alignments at will because they do not have to think of themselves as being under the restraints of conventional morality.

But images, although they facilitate control of other persons, do not facilitate control of one's self. Garry, the actor, trained in creating illusion, cannot watch himself in an off-stage role, he can only do the role. He knows that everyone, not just actors on stage, must use techniques of presentation to communicate, and this knowledge intensifies the disgust he feels at living, and being rewarded for living, a life devoted to the creation of theatrical situations neither "true" nor "false since they exist but are not “life” as such. “I’m always acting,: Garry complains, but at that moment he may be posing; he may be telling the truth and posing.

Aristocrats, artists, and bohemians, in Coward’s plays or out of them, constantly do things which remind themselves that, if they want something, they have to put on a “show” to get it. On the other hand, persons who do not constantly face the fact of role-playing still form their personalities through roles. These persons may allow themselves to forget the fact. If one convinces himself that he is “just what he is,” and if events then throw up to him the truth that “what he is” has been constructed out of the deceptions of presentations, then he too is a potential subject for a Noel Coward play.

4.

Awareness of role-playing leads to a search for the self and self-knowledge. Coward’s characters often make the search. In Design for Living, the two men and the woman they love try to understand why they find themselves so entangled. The answer depends on who they themselves are, and so they try to define themselves as well as their situation. Examples of their attempts:

“ . . a too loving spirit tied down to a predatory feminine carcass.”

“What’s the truth of it? The absolute, deep down truth? Until we know that, we can’t grapple with it. We can’t do a thing.”

“Chance caught us, as it was bound to catch us eventually.”

“It isn’t you that’s changed – it’s time and experience and new circumstances!”

The effort to define oneself is based on the premise that a person is an object consisting of a number of properties, but the premise collapses when one tries to identify what those properties are. Since Leo, Otto, and Gilda in Coward’s play are artists (Leo writes a play called Change and Decay), they should know that man defines himself, not as an object, but temporally, by creation: a painting, a deed, a baby. A man’s search for his own “design” resembles the attempt to turn around and see his own back; so "Design for Living," as Coward insists in his preface, is an ironic title. Perhaps in Design for Living the characters learn the fruitlessness of the search for a “self.” At play’s end, Ernest, Gilda’s present husband, makes a last attempt to define the trio:

It’s ludicrous to think that I was ever taken in by any of you – that I ever mistook you for anything but the unscrupulous, worthless degenerates that you are! . . . You’re shifty and irresponsible and abominable . . .!

Gilda, Otto, and Leo collapse in laughter, and Coward adds in his preface that he believes the characters are laughing at themselves.

5.

Humor depends on an uneasy awareness of discrepancy. Great comic writers – Aristophanes, Swift, Moliere, Shaw, and others – have clear eyesight and strong stomachs. Coward’s humor, and he has a considerable eye for it, springs in his best works from the discrepancies revealed by his themes, discrepancies between past and present (Madame Arcati, the medium in Blithe Spirit, quotes Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth . . .”), role and reality (Madame Arcati announces just before the séance that “I had a sudden presentiment that I was going to have a puncture [on her bike] so I went back to fetch my pump, and then of course I didn’t have a puncture at all”), expectation and result (a maid for some reason can only move at a dead run). Most important, humor springs from the conflict between truth and the illusion that one can be profound:

CHARLES: It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
RUTH: Write that down, you might forget it.
CHARLES: You underestimate me.

(Blithe Spirit)

6.

Although Coward’s plays contain a kind of knowledge, they make no demands for change in the audience. Post Mortem (1930), an anti-war play and the principle exception to this rule, is bitter but not evangelistic. The dedication of Post Mortem to William Bolitho, who was already dead in 1930, indicates a tone characteristic for Coward:

If the world doesn’t seek you out, and find you out, so much the worse for the world. It can’t matter to you.

But Coward’s despair does not result from his membership in a passing dissipated generation, as his public image would suggest. It is the product of a penetrating intellect.

Resignation and humor are Coward’s weapons against despair. Waiting in the Wings, set in the home for aging actresses, has as its theme the necessity of resignation. The staff of The Wings has no reason to feel sorry for its wards; if the staff members live long enough they will find themselves in the same condition as their charges. Either the actresses in the home become bitter or they learn acceptance. Noel Coward is the Knight of Infinite Resignation. The plays he writes and the jokes he makes show his courage:

We pooled our money, spent the lot,
The world forgetting by the world forgot.
Now we haven’t got a penny for the you know what!
Has anybody seen our ship?

(Red Peppers, in Tonight at 8:30)

* * * *

At a distance of forty-two years, there's not too much I'd change in the article today. (I have altered a word here and there where Younger Me needed editing.) I am pleased that I championed Coward when he was still somewhat underappreciated in the United States. What he himself referred to as "Dad's renaissance" had begun in England in the early 1960's, but was still not fully underway in the U.S. when I wrote the piece.

I am also pleased that I identified Coward as the actual heir of Ibsen, a point that I have not seen made elsewhere (of course it may have been). The general assumption is that Shaw took on Ibsen's mantle, an assumption based on the fact that Shaw championed Ibsen's plays (his later ones, in particular). However, Shaw's dramaturgy has next to nothing to do with Ibsen's. Shaw resolutely looks to the future. In his principal exception, Heartbreak House, the characters look backward, but with nostalgia, not with Ibsen’s sense that the past is erupting into the present.

If I were writing the article today, I would put less emphasis on the theme of resignation. Partly I stressed it because I'd just read several of Coward's later plays, in which that theme is perhaps more prominent. (I'm always particularly interested in the plays that authors wrote after their most famous work was done). I also see that I was determined to demonstrate that Coward was a Serious Playwright. I wouldn't feel the same need today, not because there aren't "serious" issues in even the lightest of Coward's plays, but because there is wider agreement today that comedy handles the same material as apparently weightier drama, only in different ways.

In fact, a lasting strength of Coward's plays is that they express a world view, one that is amply expressed in Private Lives. (One of the virtues of the recent Broadway production is that it encouraged the audience to appreciate that world view.) Coward doesn't overstate his perspective, which can also be found in writings such as his diaries, but it hovers over his works. Life, he tells us, is evanescent, and is all that there is:

ELYOT: . . . Let's blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school-children. Let's savour the delight of the moment. Come and kiss me, darling, before your body rots, and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets.

It's not a positive world view (and it's not mine) but Coward holds it consistently and it informs his plays, giving them a coherence and resonance that characterize the work of the greatest playwrights. Coward's characters maintain their lives bravely in the face of a universe that takes no notice of them.

It's noteworthy that this courageous and somewhat forlorn view of existence is embodied in the work of an author best known for writing light, brittle comedies. But this surprising juxtaposition, which only began to be clear after Coward's own generation had passed away, is another mark of his distinction. One even imagines, again, the grim countenance of Ibsen looming somewhere behind his plays. Can we call Coward superficial when his work points us to such depths?

[I happen to have seen the Broadway production of High Spirits with Tammy Grimes and Bea Lillie which Kirk mentions in “Noel, Noel.” (The actor, it seems worthy to note, who played Charles Condomine in the musicalizaton of Blithe Spirit was Edward Woodward—no relation, Kirk tells me, to the author of this article.) That was about 48 years ago, though, long before I was keeping notes or writing reports on plays I’d seen, so I can’t say much except that I’ve always liked that show and I was thrilled to have gotten to see Bea Lillie live, on stage in what turned out to be her last Broadway appearance. She didn’t die until many years later, but she seems to have retired after that show, at least as far as the States was concerned.) Some years ago, however, I made a trip to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and one of the plays in that season’s rep was Coward’s Design for Living, which Kirk mentions here, too. I’ve decided to publish a version of my report on that performance, just for the amusement of looking back at a connected article, and I’ll be posting it on ROT in several days. If you’re curious, keep an eye peeled.]