One Man, Two Guvnors: British Farce Lumbers onto Lyric Stage.
Photo: Mark S. Howard
Boston’s Lyric Stage opened its fortieth season with One Man, Two Guvnors, the 2011 British adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century A Servant of Two Masters. Like Goldoni’s play, which contemporized the commedia dell’arte, writer Richard Bean and composer-lyricist Grant Olding updated Servant of Two Masters to 1963 when the working-class Beatles were gaining world-wide popularity as class discrimination flourished in the UK.
While the basic plot and characters of One Man, Two Guvnors stick fairly close to Goldoni’s convoluted scenario, the comedy finds some of its cultural roots in the English music hall. This is particularly notable in the appearance of Francis, the comic servant (Neal A. Casey), dressed in the kind of natty, yet tacky outfit worn by British music hall comics.