Born Yesterday
Presented by the Shaw Festival
Review written by: S. James Wegg
Review: "Timeless subjectstill funny and fresh"
FIVE STARS (out of five)
Presented by the Shaw Festival
Review written by: S. James Wegg
Review: "Timeless subjectstill funny and fresh"
FIVE STARS (out of five)
Laugh-out-loud funny has invaded the Festival Theatre and will entertain and delight all comers except those whose unbounded greed and/or willful blindness have wreaked financial havoc on the unsuspecting public at any time during their careers.
In Garson Kanin’s post-WW II tale of influence peddling, junk-tycoon Harry Brock (boisterously done to a T by Thom Marriott) is pitted against mild-mannered reporter Paul Verrall (Gray Powell’s visage and glasses make him a sure-fire candidate to play Clark Kent should the other Superman ever fly into Niagara-on-the-Lake) as the former tries to become even bigger in Washington, D.C. while the later tries to cobble together enough facts to send the ruthless criminal-entrepreneur to jail.
Neither was prepared for the purposely-repressed, intellectual capacity of former chorus girl now Brock’s concubine (and, unwittingly, thanks to too-clever-by-half lawyer, Ed Devery—Patrick Galligan brings his special charm to play the affable, scotch-addicted barrister—majority-owner of the ill-gotten scrap-iron empire), Billie Dawn.
Stop the presses!
In a magnificent mixture of Georgia Engel’s (cross-reference below) dumb-blonde naïveté and Gracie Allen’s timing, Deborah Hay has come up with a characterization for the ages. Whether wondering aloud what a “Supreme Court” might be (with a senator’s wife—Donna Belleville makes the most of her sight gags—sitting in stunned surprise), playing her nightly game of gin with Brock (this scene is destined for the Canadian Comedy Hall of Fame: Marriott’s straight man allows his firecracker colleague to set the audience into hysterics as she counts points with body parts and spits back change with impunity) or discovering the beauty of classical music (“Sibeelius, Op. 47” will never sound the same), Hay almost singlehandedly makes this production the funniest in years and in the same vaunted vein as The President (cross-reference below).
Director Gina Wilkinson has done an exceptional job in keeping the pulse and rhythm of the zany piece moving in concert with the action. The first act flew by so quickly that patrons wondered how minutes could morph to seconds. Thanks to Sue Lepage’s magnificently sumptuous set (a $235/night hotel suite in Washington’s finest hotel), there was ample room and levels to keep the visual humour running neck-and-neck with the lines.
The opening bellboy sequence (Prince Amponsah, with an infectious grin along with the Cirque-du-Soleil skills of Jonathan Widdifield and Craig Pike) was an incredible ballet of bags and hat boxes that immediately set the creative/hilarity bar high and we were seldom disappointed the rest of the way.
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