I'd not seen this stage musical, though I'm very familiar with Philip Barry's sparkling play, The Philadelphia Story, that it's based on, and the dazzling movie of that play (which I think improved on Barry's script), and the delightful film musical for which Cole Porter wrote his last hit score. So I wondered why this stage musical, adapted from the movie musical, was never the big success that all its predecessors were. Now I know.
First of all, the original Broadway play and the film made from it, and the musical film made from those had casts of luminaries more than difficult to match. New England society refugee and superstar Katherine Hepburn played the Mainline Philadelphia society diva Tracy Lord in the 1938 play and 1940 movie; and Mainline Philadelphia society refugee and superstar Grace Kelly played Tracy, transferred to New England society so that the 1956 musical film could include the Newport Jazz Festival. Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, the 1940 male stars were replaced by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby in the 1956 musical.
But there are also a horde of great creative talents behind those performers. Philip Barry's play, perhaps America's most polished comedy of manners, got an even more elegant infusion of wit from the brilliant comic writer Donald Ogden Stewart for its filmscript. Probably America's greatest double-threat composer/lyricist, and certainly our wittiest, Cole Porter wrote a top-notch original score for the later musical version. And this later stage version of that musical film added a number of pre-existing Cole Porter masterworks. Arthur Kopit is one of our most talented playwrights and has done script reworking before (his Phantom [of the Opera] is, I think, the best of the lot.
But Kopit seems to have dimmed down the sheen of the previous glimpses of the upper class at play, if not even occasionally dumbed down the verbal wit of the earlier shows. Some of the wrong characters get to sing Porter's lyrics now. The show-stopping patter-song, "Well, Did You Evah?" isn't an unexpected duet partnering Tracy's upper-class former husband and working-class (reporter) new admirer; those two no longer have the scene together that audiences loved in all three former versions. Now Tracy, the female reporter, Tracy's lecherous uncle, and a large group of servants sing the number. And Porter's delicious "I Love Paris" is now made fun of as a goofing-off routine by Tracy and her little sister in the scene where they mockingly speak French when first meeting the reporters.
Normally super-savvy director Kelly Robinson makes this production worse. I had trouble anyway with Camilla Scott's Tracy for at least the first half of the show because she was apparently directed to try to charm the audience by "selling" every spoken and sung line; and most of the maids onstage seemed considerably more refined. I've liked Ms Scott in several previous shows; she has great stage magnetism, physical and vocal beauty, and can sing and dance at concert level. But she couldn't be more wrong for the dry-witted, elegant, athletic Tracy. And, indeed, I think many of the maids and butlers -- and there is a chorus of very many of them -- seem more to the manor and the manner born than the Lord family members (except for the quietly authoritative Lorne Kennedy as the father, Seth Lord). Sharry Flett's Mrs. Lord has charm but varying bearing (probably the vagaries of Robinson's direction). And some of John MacInnis' choreography is satirically comic, but much of it seems to mimic musicals set in another period.
William Schmuck's designs do manage to be simultaneously witty and semi-satirical while also stunningly attractive, especially a woodsy scene near the water, gorgeously lit by Kevin Lamotte.
Dan Chameroy plays Dexter Haven, Tracy's ex-husband, appealingly, and he sings well. I like Jay Turvey as the reporter, Mike. Placed in the film musical, those two might have seemed more right for the roles. But the slyly lecherous Uncle Willie here becomes an all-too broad clown-role, and it's hard to tell whether actor Neil Barclay or the writing or direction is at fault.
Patty Jamieson is delightful as the wisecracking reporter Liz Imbrie, but she will be out from May 24 through September 23 to give birth and start raising her baby; and her very lively dancing and pratfalls are therefore a little unsettling.
I suppose that the Shaw Festival's High Society has enough well-performed Cole Porter gems and sufficient comic carrying-on in great-looking stage surroundings to be a pleasant diversion. But, like some of its characters' seemingly vulgarized behavior, it doesn't live up to its heritage.
