Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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music by George Stiles, lyrics & book by Anthony Drewe, directed by David Connolly
Drayton Entertainment, St. Jacobs Country Playhouse, St. Jacobs
December 1-24, 2017
Ugly: “Life’s harder when you're odd”
In 2000 many people were surprised when Honk! won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical over favourites The Lion King and Mamma Mia!. Once you see the show on stage, however, as in Drayton Entertainment’s fantastic production at the St. Jacobs Country Playhouse, you will wonder no more. Honk! is not based on a rather pretentious Disney movie or on the back catalogue of a pop supergroup. It’s a wholly original musical based on Hans Christian Anderson’s familiar tale “The Ugly Duckling” (1843). The musical adaptation not only gives the original story the drama it lacks, but is extraordinarily inventive in creating the world of barnyard life into which the ugly duckling is born. Besides that, the production itself provides a witty visual humour that enhances the humour of the dialogue and lyrics.
“The Ugly Duckling” is one of Anderson’s more unusual fairy tales in that there is no magic involved anywhere in it except for the animals’ ability to speak. The ugly duckling’s transformation into a beautiful swan happens naturally over the course of time. The tale is therefore not dramatic but rather a character study of a being that suffers rejection simply for looking different from the category of species in which he has (falsely) been classified.
To solve the inherently undramatic nature of the story, book author Anthony Drewe cleverly transforms the tale into a triple quest. The first is in Anderson – the ugly duckling’s exile from home because of his siblings’ bullying and his journey to find where it is that he belongs. The second and third are Drewe’s invention. He makes the main antagonist of the ugly duckling the Cat (Kyle Blair), who befriends the duckling named Ugly (Nathan Carroll) and becomes obsessed with trying to capture and eat him since Ugly is so much larger than the ordinary ducklings. Parallel to the Cat’s pursuit of Ugly to destroy him is the quest of Ugly’s mother Ida (Susan Gilmour), who loves her child no matter what he looks like, to try to find her son to bring him home. Drewe thus gives the episodic story a continually rising tension as we wonder which of the two animals pursuing Ugly will reach him first.
Current set designer David Boechler and costume designer Rachel Berchtold follow this lead and the results are delightfully witty. The designers have chosen to set the action in the 1950s or ‘60s, probably because gender roles were then more clearly distinguished by dress just as they are by plumage and colour in the animal world. The ducklings’ father Drake (Larry Mannell) wears a fishing vest and hat and a plaid shirt while his wife Ida wears a multi-petticoated, tight-waisted yellow dress with yellow stockings, orange shoes and an apron. The ducklings all wear yellow baseball caps with orange bills and outfits that vary in their use of yellow and orange. Ugly, however, is clad entirely in grey from his baseball cap, to his sweater, shirt, knee-britches and long stockings except for his black trainers. Thus, in the brightly coloured world of the barnyard, Ugly does look completely out of place.
Ugly’s nemesis the Cat is dressed like a 1950s gangster in narrow black pants, tight black vest and sheer black turtleneck topped off with a black fedora. I don’t want to spoil the surprise of the huge amount of visual wit in the design except to hint that linking the squadron of geese to Air Force imagery and the swans to the ballet is unbelievably fun. Meanwhile, Boechler’s set looks like the kind of brightly coloured painted wooden props that children used to have in farm sets before Lego took over everything.
Susan Gilmour invests Ugly’s mother Ida with so much feeling that you soon forget she is a duck and think of her only as a mother. Her big number “Every Tear A Mother Cries” and the reprise of “Hold Your Head Up High” are so heartfelt and beautifully sung that they give Honk! an emotional heft far beyond what one might expect in a children’s musical.
As the Cat, Kyle Blair shows that he can play villains just as well as the dashing heroes he usually plays. He is able to change the natural charm he exudes as a hero into the calculating faux charm the Cat uses to convince Ugly he is his friend. Blair makes the Cat’s rendering of “You Can Play With Your Food” as the Cat plans “to have Ugly for lunch” as menacing as anything in Sweeney Todd. And Blair lets all his usual decorum go for the Cat’s epic meltdown when he finds out Ugly is a swan. We all know Blair is a super tap-dancer and ballroom dancer, but as the Cat he shows he also a superb jazz dancer as well. Sinuous, sleek and subversive, Blair embodies the Cat most through his feline movements.
The rest of the cast are excellent at distinguishing between dual roles. As Drake, Larry Mannell, as per anatine behaviour in the wild, is happy to have children by Ida, but as Ida knows, is not planning to stay around to help raise them. Mannell contrasts Drake’s non-committal attitude to marriage and fatherhood with Greyleg the goose’s obsessive, unquestioningly British adherence to duty. Similarly, Charlotte Moore is very funny as the honoured, self-important pure-bred duck Countess Grace in the barnyard who always mentions how she was once married to a Mandarin, while as Dot the goose is every bit as no-nonsense and stiff-upper-lip as Greyleg.
Aaron Walpole is huffy as the farm’s Turkey, noble as the Father swan but boisterously goofy as the green-clad dandified Bullfrog. Not only can Walpole make an excellent frog face but he sings the show’s signature number about acceptance, “Warts And All”, with real panache. Mention must also be made of the delightful twosome of Margaret Thomson as Queenie, a house cat, and Kayla James Lowbutt, a domesticated chicken, who with amusing hauteur believe that they are superior to wild animals but reveal that they do virtually nothing all day.
George Stiles’s music is unfailingly inventive and remains firmly within a Sondheimian orbit while it emphasizes the wit and numerous animal life puns in Drewe’s well-crafted lyrics. This is the cleverest, most sophisticated production of a musical I’ve seen so far by Drayton Entertainment. One assumes it will eventually travel to the company’s other theatres where it will please adults and children alike as much as it it does in St. Jacobs. It really ought to travel to Toronto, which, strangely enough, has never seen a full-scale professional production of this wonderful musical about tolerance and self-acceptance. Be sure to see it while you can.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: (from top) Nathan Carroll (in grey) as Ugly and company; Susan Gilmour as Ida and Nathan Carroll as Ugly; Kyle Blair as the Cat. ©2017 Hilary Gauld Camilleri.
For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com/honk.
2017-12-06
Honk!