The most-performed and fondly remembered plays by Sir Noel Coward leave audiences with
the kind of giddy feeling they get from champagne. Hoi Polloi, a
never-performed musical of his, is smoother and sweeter. Musicals Tonight, chosen by Coward’s estate for its world premiere, didn’t
decontaminate viewers jaded from this year’s elections with this production,
which closed a week ago Off-Broadway on Theater Row after a short run. But it
did make them smile.
When Coward wrote this musical in 1949, he was trying
to appeal much more to the man on the street than to the man in the penthouse
of his more celebrated plays. The upper-class couple here, Julian and Linda Curtis,
throw a costume ball to which they kindly invite lower-class Pinky and Harry. But Julian
and Linda are a colorless pair, without the bourbon or bon mots that always
circulated around Coward's characters in Private
Lives, Design for Living and Present
Laughter.
Hoi
Polloi is,
at heart, then, a tribute to the common people of London, a city that had
suffered grievously in WWII. It was, in fact, continuing to suffer the
aftereffects of the war when Coward wrote this, with rationing of some items still in effect. The
general austerity of the city made increasingly problematic the
economics of the kind of musical that Coward had made his own in the pre-war
period.
Before the show could be fairly launched, then,
Coward decided to scrap it. He recycled some of its songs later musicals, such as Ace of Clubs
and Sail Away. (He never again had a
major new success with new musicals, though, or, in fact, with comedies. He kept the
fire of his celebrity burning in his last two decades by reinventing himself as
a debonair, martinet-dry cabaret performer.)
By presenting this musical, then, Musicals Tonight
deviated slightly from its mission since 1988: In this case, it didn’t so much
revive a musical by masters of the form (as it did with two productions I
blogged about previously, Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon and Jule
Styne’s Hazel Flagg), but in fact unearthed
one. I wish I could say that it has unearthed a classic, but, even with a game,
talented cast, it has only produced a mildly diverting, secondary work by a
theater craftsman who undoubtedly wished he could have more time and resources
to solve his problems.
The plot is reminiscent of On the Town and My Fair Lady:
a slight boy-meets-girl tale in which a young sailor, Harry, meets and falls in
love with an ordinary London manicurist, Pinkie, and the complications that
ensue when, disregarding social convention, she accepts the Curtises' invitation to their costume party.
With a plot so tissue-thin, success depends on one
or more of the following; tunes you can’t dislodge from your head, clever
lyrics, incredible stagecraft, or scintillating choreography. Coward couldn’t consistently
provide the first two; Musicals Tonight simply can’t afford the third; and the
fourth, for whatever reason, never materializes on stage.
And so, director Mindy Cooper made do with her cast
of 10. The ones who appeared to best advantage here were Katrina Michaels as
the winsome Cockney Pinkie; Johnny Wilson, capturing Harry in all his
exuberance about falling in love and misery about possibly losing it; and Marci
Reid as the philosophical flower seller Barmey Flo, who made the most of the
affecting “Sail Away.”
Hoi
Polloi never really took flight, but it was hardly a bad
way to while away two hours, and I’m sure that Musicals Tonight's guiding force, Mel Miller, who has revived 90
musicals over nearly two decades, will soon find another show worthy of his
evident affection for this theatrical form.
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