This is the second in a series of reviews of the plays presented at this year's Western Ontario Drama League Festival.
Written by Luigi Jannuzzi
Directed by Sue Perkins
Presented by London Community Players
I'm continually being surprised by the ongoing popularity of Elvis Presley -- and not just among those of us who are old enough (*shudder*) to remember him! His remarkable life and career has been frequently described, analyzed, picked over, and pulled apart in all the media you can think of. And here he comes in a play! Oddly enough, considering the sadness of the man's story, this is a very funny play. But as the title makes clear, the play is not about Elvis himself but about his adoring fans -- mainly female. And, of course, when people are in the grip of an obsession (as so many of Presley's fans were -- and are!), it's easy to have gleeful fun at their expense.
But that raises the question: when does this kind of merriment spill over into bullying? Mocking other people, as the current election campaign in the USA makes painfully clear, can become terrible rather than funny almost before we know it's happening. The play, as we saw it, skilfully avoided that level of excess -- and the credit for this sensitivity goes equally to the playwright and to the company.
The single biggest challenge in this show is the need for a unifying element beyond the script's obsession with Elvis. Jannuzzi's script is structured as a series of independent monologues and playlets -- each with its own title and different cast of characters. The script has each scene prefaced by a reading of news headlines of the day, to help fix the time and place. A staging note: I quickly became annoyed by the microphone being carried on and off by each news reader, every single time. It was always (with one exception) being used in the same place.
Adjudicator Ron Cameron-Lewis shared with us some portions of a letter written by the author to the director. She had asked for permission to have the news headlines read live on stage rather than as a recorded voice-over, and he willingly allowed her to do that. He also provided her with one additional monologue, which he said she was free to use -- or not -- as she wished. Many playwrights are jealously protective of their babies, which is perfectly understandable, so this level of flexibility and trust in the performers is a rarity indeed!
The other unifying element is the stage set, designed by Mark Mooney. A cyclorama backdrop is decorated with half a dozen photos of Elvis at different stages of his career. Three square risers of three different heights are set at a 45-degree angle to the audience. The risers are painted all in black, with staves of Presley songs running around their sides in white. I managed to pick out the melody of "Hound Dog" on one of them. Props and furniture are moved on and off, but this base set ties the whole collection of vignettes securely together, while creating a variety of effective playing areas.
The lighting of the stage was subtle and mostly effective, although there was one annoying dark spot downstage right in an area that several of the monologue performers needed to use. In retrospect, the Festival motto of "Find Your Light" must have seemed more than a little ironic to those actors!
The biggest challenge of this show comes in the wardrobe and makeup departments. There are seven cast members, playing thirty different characters, spread across seven distinct time periods. Getting all the costumes, hairstyles, and makeup styles right for this kind of a historical pageant must have involved thousands of niggling little choices and decisions. It's very much to the credit of these artists that their work never drew attention to itself, simply taking the audience where we needed to go and keeping us firmly lodged there throughout each scene.
I wish I could review the work of every single performer as every single character, but that would take me far too long! However, here are a few of my highlights.
First scene: Catharine Sullivan was wonderful as Marion, the hardware-store sales clerk in Tupelo, Mississippi, who sold Elvis his first guitar when he was eleven. Her constant shifting back and forth between her calmly professional salesperson voice and her more active and emotional recalling of the guitar sale worked like a charm.
Robin Rundle Drake's monologue in the third scene, about meeting Elvis in the produce department at 3:00 am, was memorable for the sheer sensual power of her recounting the event. So intense was her description of the cascading fruit off the display falling all over her that I expected her at any moment to say, "So I awoke, and behold, it was a dream" or something of that sort.
The comedy honours of the evening unquestionably went to the three staff members on the White House phone system in When Nixon Met Elvis. Mary Jane Walzak was splendid as Alice, the head operator, who thankfully neither looked nor sounded like Ernestine. Ruth Korchuk as secretary Beth had the most piercing shriek, and Catharine Sullivan as secretary Cathy had the most wonderful variety of facial expressions as she described what she could see through the open door of the Oval Office. A highlight was the moment when it became clear that Elvis had entered the building, and all three women almost unconsciously began primping! The whole scene was total hilarity, right from the get-go, and the obvious comparison to the telephone song Going Steady in the film of Bye Bye Birdie was doubly apt because that show itself was inspired by "The King".
Ashley Grech was wonderful as Sherrie in the monologue about becoming a walk-on backup singer at Notre Dame University. Her prize moment was her perfectly timed, dripping-with-sarcasm, pay-off line to her recently-ex boyfriend at the very end of the scene. (Note: this was the "additional monologue" to which I referred above).
More hilarity ensued with the antics of Ruth Korchuk and Robin Rundle Drake as the two car salespeople in the Pink Cadillacs and God scene. As each one tried to outdo the other, the poor dealership manager (played by Stephen Flindall) simply got more and more bemused at their antics. I suspect most men never could understand what it was about Elvis that drove women wild -- and these two certainly were wild with the sales pitches they were concocting!
An unexpectedly humble and humane note was then struck by Mary Jane Walzak as Gertrude, the private security guard at Graceland, after Elvis' death. She was just recognizable as the same actor who had played that over-the-top telephone operator, but in this totally different character she created a whole world of kindness and thoughtfulness with a few deft touches of face and voice. A jewel of a performance.
I hate to say it, but I wish the play had ended there, with that lovely and touching vignette. The final scene, Leaving Graceland -- which is set in "today" -- was the great weak link of the script. The performers did their best with the material, but it really only has the one running gag to hold it up -- the gag about all the other staff desperately searching for wilder and wilder items of Elvis memorabilia when their best sales clerk, Leslie, announces that she is quitting. It got more and more tedious, and less and less funny. Left to themselves, Leslie and Eddie (her Elvis-impersonator boyfriend, played by Stephen Flindall) might have built up a better scene between the two of them, but the constant interruptions destroyed their chances of doing that.
The cast members did sterling work throughout the performance in mastering the different accents required for the various scenes and locations.
Sue Perkins directed this complex and rollicking show with a very deft hand. Only once did I feel sold short by the staging, and that was in the terribly cramped set-up of The Censor and the King, with three characters and two animal carry cases all crammed onto one of the three risers. The idea of three secretaries from three different offices being almost in each other's laps seemed both unlikely and uncomfortable. The single-riser idea worked much better in Warhol Explains Art to Elvis because the three women in that scene were all colleagues and used to working with each other -- so their physical closeness was more believable.
Perkins deserves special praise for the tightly-orchestrated White House phone scene, with its frequent fast shifts of tone and intercut dialogues among the three women.
Heartfelt thanks to the entire company from London Community Players for sharing this hilarious and insightful show with us!
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