Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✭✭✩
by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, directed by Neil Munro
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 6-November 10, 2001
“A Feast of Joyful Chaos”
In 1998 and 1999 the Shaw Festival had a big hit with George S. Kaufman's and Moss Hart's 1936 comedy "You Can't Take It with You". This year the Shaw has another hit on its hands with the same authors' follow-up to that play, "The Man Who Came to Dinner", again under the expert direction of Neil Munro. "Dinner" is in many ways the flip side of "You Can't". The earlier play deals with the visit of a daughter's tight-laced future in-laws to her extremely eccentric family. "Dinner" deals with the visit and prolonged stay of an extremely eccentric critic to a very tight-laced family. In both the liberating effect of existing or invading chaos is countered with a plot where love offers a woman a simpler, more ordered world.
The man in "The Man Who Came to Dinner" is the world-renowned critic and broadcaster Sheridan Whiteside, modelled after the real-life critic Alexander Woollcott. He has broken his hip in a slip on the ice at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Stanley of Mesalia, Ohio, where he was invited to dine after giving a lecture. Since he cannot be moved he must recuperate at the house. Much to the chagrin of the family, Whiteside insists his work cannot be interrupted and takes over the living room, dining room and library for his own use, exiling the Stanleys to the back of the house. When his trusted secretary falls in love with a local journalist and gives notice, Whiteside relies on the seductive powers of a famous actress to steal the young man away from her.
Such a simple plot summary does nothing to conjure up the atmosphere of this play which is the zaniest of any screwball comedy. Whiteside's impossibly large list of friends, rather like Dame Edna's today, includes all the most famous men and women of his time in all fields of endeavour. Thus he receives phone calls from H. G. Wells and Getrude Stein, presents from Admiral Byrd, the Khedive of Egypt and Shirley Temple and visits from convicted criminals and characters representing Noel Coward and the Marx Brothers. As a collector of rarities of all kinds, he receives presents of a sarcophagus, cockroaches, an octopus and emperor penguins who threatened to invade the whole house at any moment. What was a respectable house of a well-to-do family soon becomes a circus-cum-theatre where anything can happen.
This lavish production has cast of 29 but the focus of the play and master of the revels is Michael Ball as Whiteside. Ball does not fall back on his grumpy old man routine but makes Whiteside, as he must be, a fascinating character. Outwardly he hurls his highly creative abuse at everyone simply out of habit. Inwardly he is a softy ready to aid the cause of reforming criminals and to help the two Stanley children find their destiny in a way their own father will not. He is also childish in wanting to hold on to his possessions no matter what and in preventing his secretary find a destiny that does not include him. Ball makes it believable that such a wit, ogre, sentimentalist and surrogate father can all exist in one person.
Laurie Paton is excellent as his beleaguered secretary Maggie, who falls love for the first time and seeks stability after years of organizing Whiteside's chaotic life. Paton is expert at communicating conflicting emotions and a subtext at odds with the lines she speaks. Kevin Bundy makes her boyfriend the journalist Bert Jefferson a clear-headed all-American boy, but one whose innocence could well make him fall prey to the trap Whiteside sets for him. Patrick R. Brown does such a breathtakingly fine impersonation of Noel Coward (here called "Beverly Carlton") it stops the show. Simon Bradbury play Banjo, a kind of talking Harpo Marx, who infuses the last act with his manic energy. Jane Perry nearly pulls off the role of the Hollywood vamp Lorraine Sheldon but doesn't match the others in comic timing.
In smaller roles, Richard Farrell (Dr. Bradley) and Patti Jamieson (Miss Preen) both shine--he as Whiteside's bumbling doctor and she as the particular object of his wrath, his nurse. Lorne Kennedy and Nora McLellan (Mr. and Mrs. Stanley) are excellent as the irate father and fawning mother Whiteside has displaced and as are Matthew Edison and Caroline Cave as their two children who go to Whiteside for advice. Particularly noteworthy among the Stanley family is Mr. Stanley's wraithlike sister, Harriet. Mary Haney manages to make this mysterious character both funny and quite unsettling.
David Boechler's elaborate set is an exceptionally handsome home of the Gilded Age, so realistic you'd like to take a tour of the rest of the house after the show. Christina Poddubiuk has designed the huge array of detailed period costumes and Kevin Lamotte the lighting that ranges from the natural to the supernatural in number of magical effects.
Director Neil Munro has seen in this play the American tradition of the tall tale shading into absurdism. In inviting Whiteside for dinner, Munro shows that the Stanleys have unwittingly invited the thin edge of the wedge of chaos to slide into their staid lives until it comes near to prying their world apart. Munro has asked for such detailed realism from Boechler and Poddubiuk the better to undermine it with the increasingly bizarre nature of the action which he pushes further into the surreal. Eerie music and weird lighting accompany mad Harriet so that we wonder if she is even real. The piano keeps playing even after Beverly Carlton leaves it while a bright follow-spot momentarily changes the set into a cabaret. A lamp tossed upwards floats out of sight. Papers once cast up in joy continue to fall throughout the show. Between Acts 1 and 2 there is a strobe-lit parade of all the characters seen and not yet seen. And into the increasingly outlandish accumulation of detritus in stage, Munro brings on boy-sized walking penguins (mentioned in the text but not meant to be seen) as the clearest sign of chaos threatening to overrun the world and barely kept in check.
In short Munro's direction is brilliant. He's made this a play celebrating the crazy, improbable richness of life. You will leave exhilarated.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Michael Ball as Sheridan Whiteside. ©2001 David Cooper.
2001-09-21
The Man Who Came to Dinner