Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
by Kurt Weill & Ogden Nash, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 28-October 10, 2010
“Speak Low"
As its musical for 2010 the Shaw Festival is offering the rarity “One Touch of Venus” by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Ogden Nash and a book by Nash and S.J. Perelman. Because the 1943 work is so seldom staged, it is an automatic must-see for any connoisseur of the history of the musical. Perelman wrote screenplays for the Marx Brothers and anyone with a soft spot for that brand of wackiness will easily surrender to one of Broadway’s more bizarre story-lines. The production would please a much wider audience, however, if it had more incisive direction and more appealing design.
Perelman’s book takes an 1885 story by F.J. Astley called “The Tinted Venus”, a variation on the myth of Pygmalion and Galathea, and updates it from Victorian London to modern-day New York. Millionaire art collector and lecturer Whitelaw Savory has had a famous statue of Venus stolen for him from Turkey by the adventurer Taxi Black. Savory has always longed to possess this treasure since it reminds him of “the girl who got away”. Soon after the uncrating, the milquetoast barber Rodney Hatch, substituting for Savory’s regular man, arrives on the scene. When left alone with the statue he playfully places the engagement ring meant for his fiancée Gloria on statue’s finger which causes the statue to come to life. Venus immediately falls in love with Rodney thus causing an escalating series of conflicts between Rodney and Gloria (and her mother) and between Rodney and Savory, who assigns Taxi to retrieve the statue but who simultaneous falls in love with Venus. When Gloria disappears, Rodney and Venus are arrested for her murder and mayhem ensues.
The excellent programme note by Mark N. Grant astutely remarks that “‘Venus’ is golden age Broadway’s reply to the sex comedy of filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch”. Given such a fantastical story the “Lubitsch touch” is just what is needed to make it work. Unfortunately, that is precisely the approach director Eda Holmes does not take. In place of sophistication, subtlety, wit and elegance, Holmes encourages the actors to push their performances way over the top and tries to make the action as frenetic as possible, rather as she did with the two Chekhov vaudevilles at Shaw in 2006. Holmes makes the common error of trying to make a comedy funnier by making it loud and noisy, thereby missing its inherent charm and whimsy.
Designer Camellia Koo has done fine work elsewhere, but her for “Venus” are heavy and lumbering when they should be light and ingenious. She uses a curtain painted with an aerial photograph of pre-war New York for scene changes, but she has painted the panels of her sets that recombine to create each location with the same aerial view. This makes it difficult to know what each location is and creates too busy a background for the patterns of Michael Gianfrancesco’s colourful costumes. Since we can tell what a location is only by the furniture moved on, it would have been much more elegant simply to eliminate Koo’s unattractive panels and their lead pipe surrounds and her ugly lead pipe outline of the New York skyline. Koo’s sets also force much of the action into the front third of the stage making it feel needlessly cramped. It’s always a relief when her sets are removed to reveal the deeper perspective of the bare stage.
While it is impossible to ignore the flaws in direction and design, the production still makes abundantly clear that “Venus” is a true gem of a musical. What else would one expect from the dream team of Weill and Nash? “Speak Low” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” may be the show’s two best-known songs, but every song bursts with such musical and verbal wit that you don’t want to miss a single word. The score boasts a wide range of musical styles from the operetta-like “West Wind” for Savory and the waltz “Foolish Heart” for Venus to the sophisticated Cole Porteresque “Very, Very, Very” for Savory’s secretary Molly, the barbershop quartet “The Trouble with Women” and a throwback to “The Threepenny Opera” in the comically ghoulish tale of “Doctor Crippen”. It is the wealth of invention in the music and lyrics themselves, all well performed by the cast, that keep the musical afloat.
Of all the actors the one who captures best what the mood of the piece should be is Deborah Hay as Molly. She is pert, smart and sophisticated. She draws humour from the efforts of a witty, rational personal trying to make sense of the irrational events surrounding her. She has such presence and poise she becomes the focus of every scene she’s in. Robin Evan Willis and Kyle Blair follow close behind. Willis has a balletic style of movement and gesture that signifies throughout that her character comes from another world. She gives lively, sensuous interpretations of her famous songs in a voice that gain strength in its upper register. Blair is very funny as an ordinary man stuck in an extraordinary situation. He reins in the tendency to push his characterization too far and as a result has us rooting for him throughout the show.
As Savory, Mark Uhre has a fine voice with almost operatic heft. He has shown elsewhere that he is also a fine actor. Here neither he nor Holmes seems to make any sense of his character. In separate scenes we see that Savory is pompous, romantic and ruthless, but we never see what unites these disparate qualities. Homes burdens Julie Martell with the screechiest Noo Yo-uck aksint yoov evah hoid, and gives Gabrielle Jones as her mother one that even woiss. Anthony Malarky is so over the top as a mad Anatolian bent on revenge for the stolen statue that much of what he says is lost in bluster. In contrast Jay Turvey as Taxi Black and Neil Barclay as his accomplice Stanley tend to underplay their roles despite Gianfrancesco dressing Taxi up as Indiana Jones complete with whip and fedora. Billy Lake as a sailor and Jacqueline Thair as a secretary stand out for the thrill of their many dance duets in the show.
The rich score also features two dream ballets that no less a personage than Agnes de Mille choreographed for the original production. Here the task falls to Michael Lichtefeld, whose choreography and direction made “South Pacific” and “My One and Only” such joys at Stratford in 2006 and 2007. He decides to make the first ballet “Forty Minutes for Lunch” into a portrait of the rat race in New York that Venus tries to stop, at least momentarily, so that people attracted to each other can act on their impulses. The second, “Venus in Ozone Heights”, is a hilarious satire on the self-satisfied conformity of suburbia that the humble Rodney longs for but that goddess in Venus can’t abide. The two ballets stand out because, unlike the majority of the production, they employ an imaginative wittiness that perfectly suits the sophistication of the material rather than works against it.
“One Touch of Venus” is too good a musical to languish in obscurity as a recent spate of revivals in Britain and the U.S. has demonstrated. It’s too bad that for its first major revival in Canada, the Shaw Festival has not assigned it to a director with the right touch to bring this eccentric tale fully to life.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Robin Evan Willis and Kyle Blair. ©David Cooper.
2010-08-02
One Touch of Venus