"You sort of act like old movies," director Robin Phillips told a young actor shortly after taking over as artistic director of the Stratford Festival in 1975.
"But that's all most of us ever see," was the actor's reply.
"That's not how you grasp a role," Phillips responded, in a conversation captured in John Pettigrew and Jamie Portman's book about the first 30 years of Stratford. "It's not being Veronica Lake or Doris Day. Better to relate it to a real experience – like going to Loblaw's or the post office."
First of all, rest in peace, Robin Phillips. Secondly, it's really a shame that Phillips is no longer with us, as apparently his words of wisdom are as needed in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 2015 as they were in Stratford in 1975.
Every season or two, there is a Shaw Festival show that seems as if it has been mounted specifically to prove that the rumours of the Mid-Atlantic accent's death have been greatly exaggerated. This year, that would be director Blair Williams's big, baloney revival of a Moss Hart 1948 comedy called Light Up the Sky.
Hart remains best known for his collaborations with George S. Kaufman, such as You Can't Take it With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Light up the Sky is a solo effort – a three-act backstage comedy that barely has enough jokes or substance in it to justify one. Thank goodness, the sitcom soon came along to spare the theatre more overextended stinkers like this.
Blair's production begins with projections of animated curtains so cheesy that I can scarcely believe they were designed by Beth Kates and Ben Chaisson, accompanied by a recorded tune of strained jauntiness composed by Marek Norman for a sonically limited synthesizer. The actual curtain then rises on one of design director William Schmuck's tackier sets – a cluttered, sprawling hotel suite with a hideous parrot puppet squawking away at the centre.
We're at the Ritz-Carlton Boston before that most mythologized of all American theatre events: the out-of-town tryout of a Broadway-bound play. First-time playwright Peter Sloan (a charming, centred Charlie Gallant) is caught up in the whirlwind watching his earnest script be tackled by big shots: an ice-show producer named Sidney Black (Thom Marriott) looking to invest in art for once; a director named Carleton Fitzgerald (Steven Sutcliffe) who is continually on the verge of sensitive tears; and a nondescript diva named Irene Livingston (Claire Jullien) who carts around her meddling mother (Laurie Paton, who, admittedly, does a fine Lucille Ball impression) and a dud husband (an actually quite pleasant Kelly Wong) wherever she goes.
Additionally, there are a few extraneous characters kicking around such as Sidney's nasal-voiced, jewellery-loving wife (Kelli Fox, slumming it), a ghostwriter who says a few lines, then is forgotten about (Fiona Byrne), and an extremely irritating, moralizing senior playwright (Graeme Somerville, drowning in the middle of the Atlantic).
Hart's simplistic script seems to unfold in slow motion, each act hitting the same note repeatedly: The first sees the characters toasting one another; the second sees them ripping each another apart; and the third involves apologies and a tidy tacked-on moral. Little would be lost if the play were condensed into a 30-minute sitcom, the art form that inherited this style of dramatic writing and at least got it all over with more quickly.
Light Up the Sky might theoretically be funny if there were strong comic characterizations in it, but the Shaw ensemble's acting is so ersatz here that you will find more laughs at a wax museum. Indeed, Marriott, Jullien and Sutcliffe give performances that suggest that they have never met an actual actress or a director or a producer before.
Then again, I suppose the three leads have not met anyone like those depicted in Hart's self-mythologization – Broadway is not what it was in 1948, and the world of Canadian theatre has never been like it.
You can see how Light Up the Sky might have been a minor hoot consumed in its time and natural habitat – and with an alcoholic beverage at each of its two intermissions. (The Shaw Festival production does not even permit the latter pleasure, condensing the play's three acts into a lopsided two.)
But, nowadays, a punch line that consists entirely of a reference to Mortimer Snerd is more likely to have audience members reaching for Google on their phones than rolling in the aisles. (Snerd was ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's lesser known dummy, dummy.)
If Hart's play has any point, it seems to be that though theatre types may be dubious sorts, at least they sometimes usher a brave new voice to the stage – a message that could not be more ironic in the context of a subsidized theatre's patronizingly directed revival of an old mediocrity seemingly aimed at the less discerning viewers of the Turner Classic Movies channel.
J. Kelly Nestruck