Newsday
By Linda Winer
11-Aug-03
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Julie Andrews' 1954 musical becomes her directing vehicle
Everyone has known Julie Andrews as a singer. We know she can dance.
We know that she has great style and, perhaps without knowing it, we have come to identify her crisp yet creamy contradictions as an American safety standard for things least intimidatingly English.
What we did not know until this weekend, however, is how naturally Andrews, the star, can transfer those qualities to others as Andrews, the director - at least within the limitations of "The Boy Friend," the musical comedy that kicked off her Broadway career in 1954.
What we also never imagined is that the woman has a goofy streak as wide as her dignity is deep.
This is lovely. Andrews has wisely chosen to make her modest but stylish directing debut at the Bay Street Theatre, where the co-artistic director is her daughter Emma Walton and the playfully painted French Riviera sets have been designed by Walton's father and Andrew's ex-husband, the ever-expert Tony Walton.
As the politicians used to say in Chicago, what good is nepotism if you can't do a little something for the family?
Her revival of Sandy Wilson's faux-flapper pastiche is vest-pocket size, with no less a musician than Larry Grossman conducting a reduced but jaunty six-piece orchestra above one side of the tiny stage. The cast ranges from the delightfully overqualified - including Tony Roberts as Lord Brochurst, the long-married British lech - to established New York theater regulars and mostly-talented youngsters who still thank their parents in the program.
The results manage to be both amateurish and charming, a summer lark with the potential to be considerably more. Andrews has a firm grasp on the sweet foolishness of the show, which always intended to laugh at the conventions of the '20s musicals while celebrating their canny innocence.
As Wilson described the show in the '50s, this was meant to be "a new musical comedy of the 1920s." His music is ingratiatingly derivative. His rhyming is shameless - "ego" and "shake a leg-o," "palaces" and "fallacies." The romance involves a couple of rich English kids in the south of France who lie to one another to avoid fortune hunters. Meredith Patterson plays Polly Browne, one of the fresh-faced young foreigners studying at the posh finishing school run by Madame Dubonnet - Nancy Hess, late of "Chicago," with one of the evening's many intentionally-preposterous French accents.
Patterson has the peachy skin and the lilting ladylike English clip reminiscent of her famous director, along with a pleasantly grave undercurrent that grounds the character through the dance-happy plot confusions.
Sean Palmer, as Tony, the rich boy posing as a messenger, makes an appropriately down-to-earth romantic hero. Roberts - Andrews' Broadway costar in "Victor/ Victoria" - approaches the philandering demands of Tony's father with all the lightness necessary to keep the man's flirtations on the poignant side of icky.
Veanne Cox, one of the theater's comic treasures, creates a parallel universe where her French maid seems to exist in her own mad atmospheric pressure. Byron Jennings manages to maintain high stylishness as Polly's father, a character required to evolve from stiff businessman to fun-loving suitor in a single farce-filled day. Other highlights in the large cast include Andrea Chamberlain, who has a breezy '20s style as Maisie, another student at the school, plus Joyce Chittick as both sweet Fay and tough tango-dancing Lolita and Jenny Fellner, whose Dulcie does '20s boop-boop-de-doo squeals as if nobody had ever done them before.
There is inventive choreography by John DeLuca, who knows how to make charlestons and can-cans utilize entire bodies, not just feet. And, whenever Justin Bohon, the Astaire winner from "Oklahoma!," takes over one of the dance numbers, the potential of Andrews' work is easy to see.
Walton's three ambitious painted sets and his resourceful period costumes have the colors of ice-cream parfaits, ocean sunshine and Raoul Dufy. Everyone makes a lot with a little, though, even if we understand the need for scene changes in a small space, those two intermissions are a drag. What a treat to have singers with no mikes.
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