by Peter Quilter
Directed by Lezlie Wade
At Stage West Mississauga
February 11, 2010-April 16, 2010
There is nothing glorious in Stage West’s 114th production. When I saw Glorious at CanStage three years ago, Nicola Cavendish gave a riotously inventive performance as Florence Foster Jenkins, the true-life New York socialite who fancied herself a classical diva though she had no perceivable singing talent. Cavendish didn’t act as if she knew she was being comic, but she was so devastatingly off-key while being so exuberantly gay and self-confident that audiences practically split their sides with laughter at almost anything she did. At Stage West, however, Mindy Cohn gives one of the most inept professional performances I have ever seen in a comedy, and the play—not a good one, to begin with—sinks faster than a failed soufflé. Cohn lacks style, modulation, and emphases as the First Lady of the Sliding Scale. She hardly ever changes her facial expression and maintains sweetness throughout as if she were playing a middle-aged Pollyanna. Lines rattle by in her mouth and there is no telling what is meant to be a joke or merely idle dialogue. Though she changes costume in keeping with Jenkins’s irrepressible urge to be self-indulgently outrageous, she rarely raises a laugh. Her Spanish masquerade is simply fancy dress with nothing fancy going on. (Instead, the bad-tempered Spanish maid of Lynn Filusch is much funnier.) And Cohn’s angel with wings at the end tries to earn sympathetic laughter without deserving it.
To be fair, Peter Quilter’s play is a clumsy thing of shreds and patches. It is filled with drawing-room repartee, some crackling with gay puns and bitchy wit, but much of the story is filled in with documentary-style reportage rather than on-stage action. True, some of the patches are very funny, indeed—or, at least, are meant to be in the hands of competent players. But Lezlie Wade’s production is terribly uneven. Apart from Lynn Filusch’s temperamental maid who speaks nothing but Spanish, there is little to praise in the acting. Filusch also plays Mrs. Verrinder-Gedge (Jenkins’s fire-breathing nemesis) but in this case, she is merely mediocre. Justin Stadnyk’s Cosme McMoon (Jenkins’s young gay pianist) is dignified more than he is charmingly endearing. Paul Brown’s St. Clair (an aging actor and hanger-on) lacks a spring in his step and fails to enjoy himself as hugely as he might. Charlotte Moore brings the right attitude to the role of Dorothy (Jenkins’s loyal friend), but she could have extended the comic peculiarities much farther than she does. Scene changes are rendered without any discernible wit or style, and the whole affair lacks rhythm and pointed satire. The most hilarious sequence has nothing to do with Florence Jenkins. It is the funeral for Dorothy’s pet Chihuahua, but it seems to have come from an unrelated comedy. Ironically, it succeeds in diverting attention from the heart of the play to a fringe benefit, where the fringe benefit wins.
Go Back to:
Stage
Reviews