Ontario's great Shaw Festival's opening week of five productions began disappointingly but fortunately finished with two memorably fine revivals of modern classics, both new to Shawfest: a rewarding matinee of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon For the Misbegotten and a delicious new staging that evening of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday.
Opening night's Brief Encounters, the first of the season's complete "Tonight at 8:30" plays, (Noel Coward's ten short plays which have been staged in various compilations), should have been a tasty appetizer. Instead, it was an unsettling mixture of a leaden first course followed by two peculiarly flavored concoctions of not-quite-compatible ingredients.
I've seen Still Life play well onstage but never as affectingly as the iconic film, "Brief Encounter," that Coward and director David Lean fashioned from it in 1945. With a voice-over confessional narration by Celia Johnson and a nifty use of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2, brilliantly edited to accompany the practically platonic lovers, the film made two generations cry and fall in love with it. In fact, some 27 years later, the film, "A Touch of Class," had illicit lovers played by Glenda Jackson and George Segal, watching Brief Encounter and weeping together over it.
But even without the voice-overs, film close-ups, and Rachmaninoff score, the little play can amuse and awake romantic reactions. Inexplicably, director Maxwell places the lovers way upstage-right and seldom focuses the action on them. There's scant chemistry between Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan anyway, so the whole playlet seems pointless. Also slow-paced and dull.
We Were Dancing is a little romp about couples switching partners in a fancy country club on the imaginary tropical island of Somolo. Basically, the same cast chases around in what sometimes looks like Hawaiian dancing, sometimes more like a Bollywood number, all here jokily choreographed by Valerie Moore. In the morning,what looked like a love affair all night long now looks like tired blood, and the lead couple, again Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan, go their separate ways. Come to think of it, these three plays might have a better conglomerate title of "Unconsummated."
In Hands Across the Sea, the third segment, nothing is consummated. The joke here is that the addled Gilpins, who live in this elegant London flat, are just back from a trip and entertaining friends and acquaintances without being sure who are which. A couple the wife vaguely recalls staying with on that same island, Somolo, are not the couple she mistakes for them; others drop in and take advantage of their hospitality; and they all try unsuccessfully to make a good impression on each other.
As the Gilpins, Deborah Hay is amusing in the lead female (Gertrude Lawrence) role, and Patrick Gilpin looks handsome in the Noel Coward role without the requisite star quality. All the sets and costumes are beautifully created by the star of the evening, designer William Schmuck, ably highlighted by lighting designer Kevin Lamotte.
