Theater review
HILLS OF CALIFORNIA
Two hours and 45 minutes with one intermission. At the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W 44th St.
Perhaps the city should rename West 44th Street Stage Mother Way.
Between 7th and 8th Avenues at the Majestic Theatre, Audra McDonald will soon begin playing the fiercest of parents, Mama Rose, in the revival of the musical “Gypsy.”
And next door to Broadhurst, where Jez Butterworth’s new play “The Hills of California” opens on Sunday night, lives a tough English couple, Veronica Webb.
Like Rose, single mother Veronica forces her four daughters in Blackpool, England, to learn the ins and outs of show business in pursuit of an eventual escape from the squalid life spent in a shabby hotel.
Both women are morally unbalanced, and decide that sacrificing their children’s innocence for fame is worth the risk.
But there is a major difference. While inside Mama Rose is all about No.1 – “for me… and for you!” – Veronica naively believes that a career in music will save the girls from wallowing in the unsatisfactory life they lead.
Sorry, it won’t happen. We know because Butterworth’s play, directed by Sam Mendes, begins in 1976, when the Webb sisters are adults and their own mother – angry, stuck and gathered one night when the old Veronica is about to die of cancer.
Suffice it to say, the drama that caught Butterworth’s attention started to get sad and sad.
It’s not the best playwright (that’s “Jerusalem,” which Mark Rylance exploded on Broadway) or the biggest (that’s “The Ferryman”). But “Hills” has a delightfully haunting atmosphere, even though the ghosts aren’t specters, but traumas. And in the third act of the dream, the play differs from many, many dramas about children caught in the web of their parents’ pipe dreams.
The helpless flies are Gloria (Leanne Best), Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) and Jill (Helena Wilson), who descend on the Sea View Hotel, a chintzy establishment with a tiki bar and Christmas lights (“The Tragedy of Fawlty Towers” set by Rob Howell), to say goodbye to his mother who is not seen above.
Jill the cheerful spinster – selfless, stunted or both – has never left the house and has become Veronica’s guardian. Ruby has a daughter of her own. And Gloria, with her husband and son, is the brand of barking, toxic matriarch you find in American dramas such as “August: Osage Country.”
Ready to take charge, Gloria introduced herself to the nurse as “the oldest,” but she wasn’t. That will be Joan, the estranged sister who vamoosed to California in his youth and never returned. He was supposed to go to Blackpool.
“Hills” then flashes back to the 1950s, when nanny-like Veronica (Laura Donnelly) tries to whip the girls into a copycat group of the Andrews Sisters — complete with perfect harmonies, synchronized dancing and outrageous costumes — in hopes of will be fate. discovered and headlining the London Palladium.
The beautiful young Webbs mini-mes, played by Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally, Lara McDonnell and Nicola Turner.
Adding to the depression of the story, Blackpool is 250 miles away from the cultural center of London. That removed meant that Veronica had never heard of rock and roll, a genre that had rendered the Webb Sisters’ act obsolete.
Apart from women, Sea View is populated by drunks and unreliable men who, as Sally Bowles says, rent by the hour. None of Butterworth’s male characters are half as interesting or fleshed out as the Webbs. He’s only there, really, to represent what Veronica wants him to do.
Donnelly’s Veronica is a delightful creation. Staunch and librarian-like, every time the sly woman reveals a surprising detail or fib that suggests her persona is all elaborate. Cold at first, small cracks in his behavior and decide him. The slightest wavering of Donnelly’s mammoth emotional voice. As an acting achievement he managed later in the play.
The other mature Webbs match his intensity, albeit in less meaty roles. They have a one-two-three dynamic that ranges everywhere from “King Lear” to Chekhov and “The Brady Bunch,” and they click like an old singing trio — even if the musical notes are replaced by cruel barbs and curses. .
Some flying phrases are, I will admit, difficult to understand. The actor did admirably for the Blackpool accent, which can stump even those of us who are well accustomed to English brogues. This is a situation where, I believe, the best option is to reduce the authenticity.
Butterworth, after all, had no problem with blind change. It ended up being very different, and the league is much better than when I saw them play in London in June. The unnecessary, complicated shock has been destroyed and in its place there is a long-awaited, satisfying confrontation, which, once again, calls to mind “Gypsy.”
Through thick and through thin, all out or all in.
