Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✩✩✩
by John Guare, directed by Jim Mezon
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 7-October 5, 2012
“Bad News”
When the people choosing shows for the 2012 season at the Shaw Festival came across the script for His Girl Friday, they should have put it in the pile marked “Not good enough” and left it at that. Yes, the play is written by Olivier Award-winning playwright John Guare. Yes, it was commissioned by Nicholas Hytner for London’s National Theatre in 2003. But those facts don’t automatically make a play worthwhile. Indeed, His Girl Friday received lukewarm reviews then and the current Festival production demonstrates abundantly why.
The idea behind the play doesn’t look promising even on spec. Guare’s play in an adaptation of both The Front Page, the 1928 Broadway play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and His Girl Friday, the 1940 movie based on the play directed by Howard Hawks. The play is considered one the masterpieces of American drama of the 1920s. Neil Munro’s production of the play for the Festival in 1994 is the best I’ve ever seen. The movie is considered one of the greatest comic films of all time. Guare’s version is thus an adaptation of the film adaptation that tries to incorporate aspects of the original source while also adding his own new material. A mashup of two masterpieces doesn’t make another masterpiece. It tries to be both the very dark comedy the play is and the hilarious screwball comedy the film is but winds up being neither.
Guare retains the basic setup of both the original play and the film. The action takes place in the Press Room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building that sits just across from the jail and overlooks the prison gallows. The Press Room is packed with reporters from all the city newspapers passing the time in macabre jokes while they wait to witness the hanging of a man accused of killing a policeman. Hildy Johnson, once the star reporter for the Examiner comes in to say a last goodbye to the old gang before heading off for marriage and quiet life. However, Walter Burns, managing editor of the Examiner, sees this as one last chance to persuade Hildy to stay. When the prisoner escapes, all the reporters but Hildy and Walter flee the room for the story. When the convict enters the Press Room to hide and confesses his innocence, both Hildy and Walter realize they’ve got the exclusive to beat all exclusives and Hildy’s newspaper instincts can’t help but take over. The question is how to keep the man hidden and safe when all the Chicago police and press are looking for him.
When Hawks came to film the play that had just been filmed nine years earlier by Lewis Milestone, he had the brilliant idea of changing the sex of Hildy from male to female and thus to give Walter the incentive not just to get Hildy back into the business but back into his life. Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien as Walter and Hildy in 1931 became Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in 1940, and the sexual tension between the two lit up the screen and banished the original darkness of the play.
It’s clearly this tension that Guare is attempting to capture and wants us to see Walter’s various ploys to get Hildy back as purely comic rather than malevolent as they are in the play and certainly were in Munro’s production. Guare, however, also wants to keep the darkness of the original play. To that end he moves the action forward from 1928 to 1939. He changes the prisoner’s name from Earl Williams to Earl Holub, and instead of being convicted as a white man who has killed a black policeman, Guare makes him a recent Jewish Czech immigrant who has killed a white Christian policeman of long standing. The updating allows the general gallows humour of the reporters’ chat in the original to be spiced up with large helpings of antisemitic and anti-immigrant sentiments. Along with this comes frequent admiration for Hitler and what he is doing in Germany, Chicago being a heavily German city and the U.S. still taking an isolationist view of World War II. When Holub is called a “terrorist” and is made a scapegoat so the Mayor can assure himself of the German vote, we know that Guare in 2003 is attempting to tap into the anti-Muslim hysteria that followed the 9/11 attacks.
While it is interesting to see a writer address the pro-German sentiment that existed in the States before Pearl Harbor, the darkness of this background makes it impossible for Guare to capture the screwball hilarity of Hawks’ film. The reporters and the corrupt Mayor inhabit a completely different world for the Walter and Hildy plot involving her milksop fiancé and his mother. Director Jim Mezon is helpless to make the transition from the one to the other anything less than clunky. And we hardly feel like laughing when the atmosphere in general is so poisonous. The worst example is when a woman commits suicide by jumping out the Press Room window and Walter and Hildy return to their banter as if nothing had happened. This sort of jarring juxtaposition makes Guare’s play feel less like a blending of the two sources and more like a cut-and-paste job.
The one function Guare’s adaptation could serve is as a showcase for the talents of the two leads, but even here the production fails. There is no chemistry between Benedict Campbell as Walter and Nicole Underhay as Hildy. The fault is all on Campbell’s side. His fine, resonant voice, if not properly controlled can sound too theatrical and make everything he says seem false. His style was perfect for the pedantic Henry Higgins in last year’s My Fair Lady, but here what he says too often sounds like bluster rather than the rapid-fire repartee it is supposed to be. For her part, Underhay is as ebullient as ever and is thoroughly believable as a woman with enough steel in her to make it in a tough guy’s world. But she can’t recreate the Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell give-and-take all on her own.
There are many standouts in the 22-person cast. Kevin Bundy, so expert at playing ineffectual men, makes Hildy’s boring fiancé Bruce look like a wet noodle compared to her. Thom Allison exudes unflappable urban cool as Diamond Louie, the newsmen’s link to the criminal underworld. Andrew Bunker is so pitiable as the hounded Earl Holub that seems almost cruel that the playwright makes him a figure of fun. As Mollie Molloy, the woman who loves him, Krista Colosimo is so emotionally tortured she seems to come from an entirely different play. Thom Marriott makes a strong impression in the small but key role as the vicious, corrupt Mayor of Chicago who wants to see Holub dead for his own political gain. Peter Krantz plays the Sheriff as comically harebrained official who only wants to follow orders. Wendy Thatcher would be effective as Bruce’s domineering mother Mrs. Baldwin, but with the police so identified with fascists in the play, her abuse at their hands is not very funny.
Peter Hartwell has designed a wonderfully grimy, litter-strewn Press Room that seems to reek of cigarette smoke, rotten food and booze. It would be more effective if the windows near the door to the room didn’t wobble like plastic given how often the door is slammed shut. John Gzowski provides a thoroughly realistic soundscape and Kevin Lamotte carefully takes us through changing light of the day.
Since Guare’s hybrid simply doesn’t work, it would have been better simply to revive The Front Page with Underhay as Hildy and a few changed pronouns. Otherwise, there are so many large-scale American dramas and comedies of the period that the Shaw Festival has not staged, it would be better to mount one of these than this modern but deficient jumble of two 20th-century classics.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nicole Underhay and Benedict Campbell. ©2012 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2012-08-27
His Girl Friday