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(Pictured: Amanda (Mindy Anders) and Victor (Tim Williams)
Did anyone ever live with so much style and wit as Amanda Prynne and Elyot Chase, the dueling lovers in Private Lives? Noel Coward did, and it's Coward we have to thank for the sustained hilarity of this classic 1930 comedy, which has made a long-overdue return to the area in Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's glittering production.
The sophisticated ex-spouses he invented for Private Lives are creatures of glorious fantasy in the Shakespeare Festival's production, which seems to be fueled entirely by something lighter than air.
Director Patrick Flick may have added a mini-production number and a ninja-inspired mock-battle scene, but the comic timing and invention come from a nifty set of actors, who make this show a happy respite from a brisk winter night.
Private Lives, the story of two bickering ex-spouses who fall in love all over again even though they're on honeymoon with a new husband and a new wife in tow, has been an audience favorite since its premiere in London, where Coward and soulmate Gertrude Lawrence played the leads and a young Laurence Olivier played the priggish supporting role of Victor.
Tallulah Bankhead, Maggie Smith, Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton went on to star in the show, which has had six Broadway revivals: In the most recent, two years ago, British actors Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan had audiences in a continual state of bliss.
At the Margeson Theater, the show unfolds on Bob Phillips' expansive set, which transforms from the terrace of a luxurious French resort hotel in the first act to an ever-so-stylish Paris flat in acts two and three. Eric T. Haugen's lighting bathes the characters in a rosy glow, and Rebecca Baygents Turk's costumes are both sophisticated and right for the characters: Elyot's second wife, Sybil, wears an evening gown that, with its violet frill, is just as awful as she is.
Director Flick and his cohorts have gotten the show's style just right, as well, and then they've kicked it up a notch. All four of the main characters speak with the most precious of upper-class British accents, and all four are given to striking poses that might have seemed at home in the 1930s-British equivalent of Town and Country, or maybe Horse and Hound.
Eric Hissom's Elyot, with his thin mustache and carefully coifed head of hair, looks like a '30s movie star; Sarah Hankins' Sybil speaks with the exaggeratedly nasal tone of a spoiled deb, and her platinum bob is perfect for the occasion. Mindy Anders, who plays Amanda, has a cooler, sleeker brunette version of the same do, and Timothy Williams' Victor, Amanda's second husband, is a fop with a pipe.
Even the French maid, Louise, is carried to the nth degree: Paula Rossman plays her with the red nose of a serious upper-respiratory ailment and the furious manner that arises when the oh-so-superior French have to deal with doltish Brits... Hankins is a stitch as a blond bombshell with an all-too-conventional inner core, and Williams, his hair slicked back just so, is a perfect portrait of a peckish little man -- the kind of man who, as Victor says, is "glad I'm normal."
As Amanda, Anders is elegant and languorous, a willowy woman given to drawing out her vowel sounds to the extreme. But she has the no-nonsense waywardness of the young Katharine Hepburn: This Amanda will follow the smaller conventions, but the larger ones have nothing to do with her.
And Hissom, who seemed like an odd choice for the role, makes Elyot the most fully formed character onstage, a suave man whose uncertainties are boiling just beneath the surface, a man hilariously possessed.
...(The Show) flies as if on wings, with quips and comebacks whipping this way and that but not a bon mot lost in the confusion. Maybe, in the 21st century, Noel Coward's cosmopolitan world feels a great distance from our own. But for a fleeting 2½ hours it's a mighty fine place to be.
The Orlando Weekly
Excerpts from the review by Al Krulick
posted January 22, 2004
The year is 1930, and wealthy English socialite Amanda Prynne is on her honey-moon -- again. On a hotel terrace in the resort town of Deauville, France, Mandy is trying without much success to steer the topic of conversation away from her first marriage, to the rakish Elyot Chase. But much to her consternation, her new husband, the prim and proper Victor Prynne, cannot help but delve into her former travails. It's true, she admits: She adored Elyot. But their union was much too tempestuous. Now she's ready for a calmer love.
There is another honeymoon couple at the hotel as well: As fate would have it, the aforementioned Elyot has just arrived with his new wife, Sybil. She, too, has peppered her spouse with questions about this former marriage; with devastating honesty, Elyot confesses that Mandy was indeed the love of his life. But this time he is looking for a less dramatic liaison -- "something steady and sweet, to smooth out your nerves when you're tired."
Naturally, Elyot and Amanda discover one another on the terrace, and their mutual passion is quickly reignited. After vainly endeavoring to be true to their new partners, they decide to leave them in the lurch and head out instead for Mandy's pied-á-terre in Paris to take up the combustible relationship they left behind five years ago.
This is the story of "Private Lives," the play that its author, Noël Coward, dubbed an "intimate comedy." The Orlando Shakespeare Festival has jumped impetuously into Coward's world of scintillating wit and jagged sophistication, a world where cocktails are always being served and everyone dresses formally for dinner and pretends to hate St. Moritz. The result is an engaging, freewheeling romp and battle royal of the sexes, as the patina of British upper class sensibility is peeled away to reveal the private ardors and violent tendencies that lie just beneath the surface.
Eric Hissom and Mindy Anders play star-crossed lovers Elyot and Amanda. They are a perfectly matched couple of heavyweight amorists -- skilled in the art of boudoir politics yet quick to fall prey to petty jealousies and slights to their vanity. They have a marvelous time alternately pawing one another with fervent desire and then clawing at each other's old wounds. For them, there is no calm love. They are at their best only when inflamed, either with passion or anger.
Director Patrick Flick has decided to play to the strengths of his two leads, taking Coward's percolating verbosity and adding to it a physical rambunctiousness and almost commedia-like antic quality. He has found many places to insert bits of visual humor; indeed, Hissom and Anders seem most comfortable when dancing around Mandy's Paris apartment in a stylized two-step or tearing it apart in a violent frenzy of unrepressed emotion....
Timothy Williams and Sarah Hankins co-star as Victor and Sybil, the hapless new spouses of convenience.... Hankins is particularly amusing, with a delightfully goofy vocal signature that sounds like a mentally unbalanced cuckoo. When happy, her character projects the warble outward; when sad, she sucks the same sound inward and in reverse.
Stage designer Bob Phillips and lighting designer Eric T. Haugen provide a gorgeous setting in which Coward's story of love and betrayal can be comfortably and stylishly portrayed. All in all, the Shakespeare Festival has acquitted itself admirably with this foray into the urbane world of Noël Coward. By all means, go and savor this production -- and then have your cocktails on the veranda.
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Last Updated: 05/06/2007 Copyright Orlando Shakespeare Theater |
