Theatre Ontario Festival 2015 # 3: Born Yesterday and Still Lovable Today

This is my third review of the 2015 Theatre Ontario Festival, an event which brings together the winning productions of four regional festivals. 


Friday, May 15, 2015
Born Yesterday by Garson Kanin
Representing EODL (Eastern Ontario)
Presented by Peterborough Theatre Guild


For this performance, the presenting group has reached back to a play which was very famous in its day but is less often staged now.  And it was a huge success in its first Broadway appearance, which lasted for almost four years and ran 1642 performances!  But times change and so do audience tastes.  Subsequent Broadway revivals in 1989 and 2011 lasted only 153 and 101 performances respectively.  Here again we have an example of a script which lives in a world whose social and cultural assumptions were very different from ours.  Part of the acid test is the whole question of whether such a script can truly speak to audiences in later times.


The original show was written for Jean Arthur, but when Arthur withdrew during out-of-town tryouts the play then proved to be the catapult to stardom for Judy Holliday, a comedian of truly remarkable gifts.  The fact that the show still works at all is largely due to the brilliant contrast between the uneducated but deep-down-sensible Billie Dawn (Holliday's role) and her brutish keeper, scrap-metal "businessman" Harry Brock.  Because many in our society have become largely immune to news of governmental scandals, the play stands or falls more than ever by the actor portraying the role of Billie Dawn.


(It's an interesting little side note, to me, that another of Judy Holliday's famous roles -- the musical Bells Are Ringing -- cast her similarly as an uneducated but sensible girl who manages to undo the shenanigans of a bookie mob.)


Anyway, to the Peterborough Theatre Guild's presentation of the play.  The set was spectacular, and carefully thought out.  The deluxe Washington hotel suite was both spare and sumptuous, with a rich red carpet and marble steps, curving walls, simple but elegant furniture, and wall sconce lamps, all in the height of Art Deco, and all beautifully understated.  There were two main acting areas, above and below a step running the width of the room, and some good use was also made of the main staircase running up to the raised bedrooms.  A circular window at the head of the stairs framed a classic night view of Washington.  It niggled at me that this remained a night view even on scenes played in the daytime, but since it was in any case a highly stylized portrayal in the manner of Erté, this wasn't too critical.


The company made good use of a team of manager, bellhops, and housekeepers, not only to lead us into the show in the opening scene but also to do a very fine running scene change between Acts 1 and 2, which were fused together.  David Adams roared into the room, flinging coat and shoes recklessly around, and set the tone of the boorish Harry Brock in a matter of 2 seconds -- the man of power who always gets what he wants, when he wants it.  Chuck Vollmar as Eddie, his gofer guy, and Wyatt Lamoureux as Ed Devery, his lawyer/fixer, played really good contrasting approaches to this perpetually erupting volcano of a man, both metaphorically and literally tiptoeing around him.  Lamoureux in particular made good use of a classic hands-up gesture that was half-defensive, half-apologetic whenever Harry barked at him.  In some ways, Ed Devery is the most sensible person in Harry's entourage, and Lamoureux totally made me believe that Harry should have been listening to him more closely.


Mark Gray gave a smoothly-oiled, well-polished portrayal of the corrupt Senator Hedges, and Audrey Bain did all she could with the ungrateful role of Mrs. Hedges, who appears only in Act 1 -- a walking, talking "Senator's Wife Doll" is perhaps the kindest way to describe how the character is written.


For the first ten minutes or so, the play elicited only a few mild chuckles from the audience.  But then Billie Dawn entered, portrayed by Kellie McKenty, and the show took off.  McKenty made fine use of a high-pitched, giggly voice with a broad back-streets accent.  She was excellent at capturing Billie's airheaded follies and her moments of sterling good sense, and made them all of a piece in her character.  That's critical, because the central action of the play -- the education of Billie Dawn -- couldn't have been done with a woman who was all air-headed.  The duality of the character has to be clearly seen right from the get-go.  McKenty certainly accomplished that.  As the show went on, she moved more often to a slightly lower pitch range, not abandoning the high end of the voice, but still making a telling difference when Billie began to put everything together in her mind.


Paul Verrall, the young journalist who educates, woos and wins Billie, was effectively played by Mark Paton.  The thick-rimmed Clark Kent glasses did nothing to conceal the clear impression (instantly created by Paton) that here was the one man in the story who could not be bought by moneybags Brock.  The scenes between the two of them, as he sets to work to educate Billie, were delightful, the comic repartee flowing easily and naturally, and I found the romantic moments believable too -- except that I really thought one or both of them should have been looking a little more worried about being caught or interrupted by the human volcano in the upstairs room.  Even in the scene in Act 3 when they sneak back into the suite, the worry and fear wasn't coming out as strongly as it could have been. 


I felt that the pacing was a mixed bag, in the first act especially, as things seemed alternately to be going too quickly and then too slowly.  It gave the performance a feel of start-stop-start-stop.  That's not precisely what happened, but the easiest way I can describe the speed shifts that I felt.  In the first act, the speed shifts caused some key lines to get thrown away, making it a little more difficult to follow the detailed plottings of Brock and his henchmen.  That wasn't critical, because his basic intention to own Washington was clearly enough played, but it still would have been more helpful to hear and understand all of those speeches.  In the third act, the company finally hit their stride and the show began to flow much more easily and naturally. 


The trickiest point in the show is the moments of violence.  That's particularly true of the scene where Brock completely snaps and assaults Billie.  It's not pleasant to watch, and that can be credited to the fact that the company didn't cheat the scenes but played them right out.  McKenty's slow, broken walk up the stairs was the ideal counterweight to her earlier free-swinging stair climb in Act 1, and the difference created a moment of sheer heartbreak for me.  But of course, she doesn't stay down for long and comes out swinging again soon enough.


I did find the blocking awkward and clunky in a couple of spots, most notably in the final sequence of the play before Billie and Paul exit together to their new married life.  Scenes like this, with so many characters on stage at once, do present major problems, but I certainly felt this could have been better handled.


Despite all these glitches, on the whole I found this a very strong show, and definitely a very entertaining evening of the theatre.  It was a great fun romp which the audience enjoyed immensely.