Month: August 2011

A British accent does not a funny play make. I wish this concept were better understood, especially by the Shaw Festival, which insists on making its actors attempt authentic accents in all of its plays. For My Fair Lady, a musical that’s actually about accents, there’s no escaping this. But for Shaw’s comedy plays, Heartbreak House and Candida, there’s no reason to bother with them unless you can be certain that the accents will be perfect and even then…

Unfortunately, the British accents in these productions at this year’s Shaw Festival are painfully and distractingly bad: like fingernails on a chalkboard. I’m hardly an expert on British accents, but I have seen enough British film to be able to tell a good accent from a terrible one, and these accents are right up there with Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.

For years, the Stratford Festival hasn’t bothered with English accents in its productions of Shakespeare’s plays. I crowned this year’s Richard III a triumph even though none of the actors spoke with British accents that the real characters no doubt would have had. But perhaps that’s partly why the production triumphed: more focus on acting, less energy wasted on attempting failed accents. Unfortunately, the Shaw Festival hasn’t quite gained the confidence to dispel with the useless accents.

Heartbreak House is one long dinner party with a cast of despicable characters, all in love with somebody else’s husband or fiancée. It should be funny but dark, but most laughs were forced out of a recognition of the witty dialogue in spite of the delivery. The set provides a horrible distraction: the action looks like it’s taking place on a boat, but it seems to have walls and staircases like a house. Is it a house or a boat? A house or a boat? By the third act, the walls are gone and the house/boat is rocking back and forth and back and forth. Why? Who knows? To make the actors as sea sick as the audience is sick of the show.

Candida is a slight improvement over Heartbreak House and benefits from the very charismatic Claire Jullien in the title role. Her delivery of almost all of Shaw’s dialogue does it justice and lends it the wit it deserves; her accent is also much better than that of her peers, which certainly helps. Unfortunately, the production is dragged down by the amusing, but ultimately over-the-top acting by Wade Bogart O’Brien as the clumsy lovesick Marchbanks. In fact, Marchbanks is so goofy that his crush on Candida poses no real threat to the domestic bliss between Candida and her husband Morrell (Nigel Shawn Williams). But Williams plays Morrell so straight that he somehow feels threatened, making the action seem unrealistically serious, and taking all the bite out of the comedy.

Ironically, when the Shaw Festival does Shaw, it fails spectacularly. It seems to take a Tennessee Williams play — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof this season — to show us that the Shaw Festival can compete with the best of them. Perhaps it’s a good thing that they’re toning down the dose of Shaw in next year’s festival.

Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away is an eighty-minute Broadway show of phenomenal dancing and choreography, set to standards sung by Frank Sinatra, with a live big band on stage. It’s the kind of show that can have the nerve to do “Pick Yourself Up” — a famous song-and-dance number from Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — and actually manage to compete with Astaire and Rogers. The choreography is more modern than the 1930s film, but it’s right up there, as are the dancers.

The show plays like a series of music videos for a long list of songs Sinatra popularized, from “Luck Be a Lady” to “Fly Me to the Moon” to “Learnin’ the Blues”, where Tharp’s choreography tells a short story within the song and brings the music to life. It’s great music from another time, and the choreography makes a nod to the past while giving the music a present relevance. The musical takes place during one long night at a night club where couples meet, court, and much more. But the story isn’t the point and barely exists. We get to dispense with what is usually the worst part of a musical: lame dialogue. This means the casting is based solely on dancing ability; Sinatra sings and there isn’t much acting to do. So the dancers aren’t just good Broadway dancers. They’re fantastic dancers even for Broadway.

And Tharp pulls it off like a dream. Every dance number is strong and every dancer is very strong. It’s not just that they are all impressively athletic — which they are — but they are able to do incredibly complicated dance moves, precisely in time, even when moving from one fast-paced complicated maneuver to another. The dancing is a celebration of the music and the dancers move to accentuate the rhythms in the pieces. The biggest rhythmic challenge is probably when the cast takes on dancing to Brubeck’s “Take Five”, famous for its ⁵/₄ time signature. Almost all dances are based on ³/₄ or ⁴/₄ time, and ⁵/₄ time is awkward for musicians; now imagine trying to keep time and dance to that with complex choreography that requires being constantly in time. It works.