the Shaw Festival triumphs over inferior material with Grand Hotel.
NIAGARA-ON THE-LAKE, Ont. — The musical numbers are sublime in their execution. The visuals can be stunning — reflecting a creative imagination that embraces the adage that less can often mean more. A superb cast has been assembled. The entire evening has a silken efficiency that reflects professionalism at its highest. What more can we want?
Well, perhaps, we might expect better material than Grand Hotel:, The Musical. This 1989 show may have inexplicably lasted on Broadway for more than a thousand performers, but the fact remains that it is a trite reworking of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel and the classic 1932 film version chronicling a few emotionally turbulent hours in the life of a luxury Berlin hotel.
However, the Shaw Festival is proving to us this summer that an accomplished theatre company can work miracles. Eda Holmes’s production turns this problematic piece into a rousing and emotionally engaging piece of theatre. And its credibility is further strengthened by knockout performances from the likes of Michael Therriault as a dying bookkeeper, determined to squander his slender savings in a final fling in Berlin’s grandest hotel, and Deborah Hay as a driven diva with insecurities both in her career and her love life.
Not bad for a musical with several strikes against it. The first is Luther Davis’s glib, shallow book for the musical — a script so flimsy in its characterization, and so inferior to the earlier screenplay, that it poses major challenges to cast members. The second is that it is burdened with mediocre music and lyrics from Robert Wright and George Forrest.
Indeed, it’s of some significance that this pair’s most successful Broadway offerings made their mark by filching the music of other, much greater, composers. Hence Kismet was anchored in the compositions of Alexander Borodin and Song of Norway in the music of Edvard Grieg. It’s also significant that when director Tommy Tune took on the task of bringing Grand Hotel to Broadway after earlier false starts, he was so disenchanted with the original songs that he hired tunesmith Maury Yeston to pep up the lyrics and write six new numbers.
Despite Yeston’s intervention, this musical would still lack a single enduring song. But Yeston’s theatrical instincts were nevertheless working when he came up with an opening ensemble number with sufficient pizzazz to make an impact — provided production personnel were on the bit.
So in the Shaw’s Festival Theatre, we have director Eda Holmes, choreographer Parker Esse and a responsive cast introducing a swirling almost phantasmagoric world to us, with further ballast supplied by musical director Paul Sportelli and an orchestra committed to convincing us that the score’s half-baked Kurt Weill pretensions add up to something of substance. Sportelli, working with his own shrewd orchestrations and able musicians, teases out a texture capable of delivering sardonic echoes of the dying days of the Weimar Republic.
Audience members devoted to elaborate sets and displays of high-tech virtuosity may find this production too sparing — even stingy — in its look. But set designer Judith Bowden’s art deco pillars and fellow designer Kevin Fraser’s subtle lighting provide a flexible environment in which the occupants of the Grand Hotel can work out their destinies.
And if we at times seem to be enveloped in a dream state, a place of shifting impressions, that’s appropriate too — given that what’s happening may well be filtered for us through the fevered memories of a doctor who has emerged from the horrors of the First World War maimed in both mind and body.
The doctor also functions as a chorus to the proceedings, and Steven Sutcliffe takes on this role, imbuing it with a pained, rueful cynicism that reveals the skull beneath the skin. Sutcliffe’s characterization, so commanding at the outset of the show, is a portent of the excellence we can expect from other performances.
To be sure, the demands on cast members can be heavy. There are limits to what James Daly can do in the flimsily written role of the penniless baron who is on the run from the mob and is desperately in need of money. But he manages to bring some emotional conviction to his scenes with Deborah Hay’s ballerina, in which infatuation blurs his intention of robbing her, and in his friendship with Michael Therriault’s lonely bookkeeper. Jay Turvey has the thankless role of shady financier, Preysing — the script supplies no more than a sketch of a character — so perhaps he may be forgiven for making him more sympathetic than he should be.
Elsewhere, Vanessa Sears is genuinely touching and also resilient in the old Joan Crawford role of a star-struck typist dreaming futile dreams of a Hollywood career. She’s responsible for one of the evening’s solid music moments with her yearning rendition of The Girl In The Mirror. And festival mainstay Patty Jamieson is wonderful as Raffaela, the troubled diva’s devoted friend and companion. This is a performer who can find emotional truth in the most pedestrian song.
Deborah Hay is that ballerina extraordinaire, Elizaveta Grushinskaya, confidently shaking off the formidable shadow of Garbo in the movie and giving us the elements of a gifted, mercurial and vulnerable personality. She also helps bring substance to James Daly’s Baron in their scenes together — as well as to the music. A song like Love Can’t Happen would seem pretty inadequate, even banal, without the commitment that these two bring to it.
As for Michael Therriault, immersed as always in whatever character he portrays, he is memorable as the ailing bookkeeper, Otto Kringelein, a seeming nonentity who proves to be anything but as he decides to spend his last days enjoying himself. That includes telling his old boss, Preysing, what he thinks of him, and throwing all caution to the winds in a couple of exhilarating musical numbers. Such moments, sparklingly choreographed by Parker Esse, are further evidence of this production’s success in producing a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Finally, the show-stopping tap routines of The Two Jimmys — Matt Nethersole and Kiera Sangster — are in a class of their own. Their nimble charm will extract a smile from even the most grudging countenance.
(Grand Hotel continues to October 14. Further information at 1 800 511 SHAW or shawfest.com)