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by Ferenc Molnár, directed by Blair Williams

Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 5-October 5, 2008

"Hail to the Chief!"

“The President” is simply one of the funniest lunchtime shows the Shaw Festival has ever presented.  After the performance the audience literally glows from having laughed so hard.  The play may be only one hour long but it’s worth the trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake for such a giddily joyful experience.

The production is anchored by the absolutely jaw-dropping performance of Lorne Kennedy in the title role.  He plays Norrison, the president of an enormous company, who makes a practice of knowing something of the personal life and habits of every one of his employees.  His speeches consists of mile-a-minute deliveries of reams of complex instructions mixed with personal asides the likes of which you have likely never heard since the great talking matches in 1940s movies like “His Girl Friday”.  All this Kennedy achieves with absolute aplomb plus a clarity of diction and variety of expression that is simply incredible.  It’s a performance you will never forget.

The original play by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952) premiered in Budapest in 1929 and is set in an unnamed Central European capital.  In 1961 Billy Wilder used the play as the basis for his film “One, Two, Three” (a title that translates the Hungarian original), where the Molnár’s president Nordson is renamed MacNamara and is made head of Coca-Cola in West Berlin.  Canadian playwright Morwyn Brebner working from a new translation by Peter Kaslik has retitled the play, transferred the action to New York City and mingled the time period of the play with that of the film.  Thus, all the wines Nordson, now called Norrison, refers to are from 1927 and earlier whereas the cameras he mentions first appeared in the 1960s.  Similarly, designer Cameron Porteous deliberately mixes the two periods.  Norrison’s office is a gorgeous round wood-panelled Art Deco showpiece with a view out the window directly of the Chrysler Building (completed in 1931).  The costumes, however, are all from the 1960s, most notably the clingy all-white Marilyn Monroe dress for Norrison’s ward Lydia, not to mention her Monroe-like blonde wig and makeup.  The double-vision is appropriate since it captures the flavour of the original while presenting the action in a time of moral conformity that we are more familiar with that motivates Norrison’s drastic actions.

The story is very simple.  Lydia, daughter of an American tycoon, has been in the care of Norrison, whose wife is known for her campaigns for moral strictness, while Lydia's parents are on holiday.  While Norrison was supposed to be protecting Lydia from vice, she has fallen in love with and secretly married not the wealthy nobleman her parents had hoped for but Tony Foot, an ordinary taxi driver and Communist party member besides.  There is only one hour from the moment Lydia reveals her situation to Norrison to the time when Lydia’s parents are due to arrive in New York.  In that one hour Norrison undertakes a complete makeover of Mr. Foot to turn him into the man of Lydia’s  parents’ dreams.  With one of Norrison’s secretaries set to announce the time every ten minutes, we are off on Norrison’s seemingly impossible beat-the-clock task.

While Brebner’s adaptation of the dialogue itself is funny, what keeps the audience in gasping for breath is Kennedy’s delivery and the split-second timing of all the dialogue and action of the entire cast, many of whom play multiple roles.  Well-known Shaw actor Blair Williams, making his directorial debut, deserves enormous praise for getting this madcap play to come off with such unbelievably rapid clockwork precision.  

While Kennedy is obviously the lynchpin of the whole enterprise, many others of the 15-member cast of are also impressive.  Chilina Kennedy is hilarious as Lydia.  She may me got up to look like Marilyn Monroe but her airheadedness is all her own.  Jeff Meadows seems an irredeemable lout as Tony Foot, but it’s fun to see how after much chafing at the changes he begins to take to the new role he’s given.  David Schurmann is Norrison’s imperturbable advisor Bartleby, who alone among the cast speaks at a measured pace.  Nicole Correia-Damude is the perpetually weeping Miss Petrovich, mascara all adrip.  Mike Nadajewski masterfully takes on three roles--the feverish accountant Mr. Pinsky, the slimy photographer Mr. Christian, whose caddishness towards Miss Petrovich Norrison also cures, and, most comically, the shy, homely Miss Hoyngabow, whom Norrison assigns as secretary to Foot so Lydia won’t be jealous.  Michael Ball has a tiny but memorable cameo as the Count von Schottenberg, the drunken janitor of the building who just happens to have a useful aristocratic name,  

Molnár’s comedy superficially is an expansion of the old saying that “clothes make the man”.  At the same time, however, as Norrison makes clear in his final remarks, is it a satire on humanity who seem to fall for appearances over reality time after time.  This is a true gem of a play with a phenomenal central performance that no one should miss.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Chilina Kennedy and Lorne Kennedy. ©David Cooper.