The Hills of California arrives in New York just when it’s most needed. I certainly needed it, having suffered through the not-muchness of Good Bones Off Broadway and, worse, McNeal, which crash-landed Iron Man at Lincoln Center Theater. Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. is game if unpersuasive as a Nobel Prize winner apparently so desperate to escape his own life he outsources his latest biographical novel to AI, so the show comes at us in shards of faction so confused Oppenheimer couldn’t make sense of it. By turns distasteful and dull it’s the fault of Pulitzer winner Ayad Akhtar (whose Disgraced is riveting), veteran director Bartlett Sher, and some old design hands at the Vivian Beaumont who’ve turned the stage into a science center, so snazzy (and so cold) that even costars on the order of Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles can’t bring any life or warmth to it.
But–these things happen, and we must all regroup and move on. And so to the Broadhurst and The Hills of California, which has neither hills nor California (though the rather imprisoning staircases that partly define the set are steep, and L.A. does play a part in it.) It’s the title of a Johnny Mercer hit from 1948, one of several songs, mostly by the Andrews Sisters, that are performed over the course of its two acts (plus pause). But it’s not a musical. There is a wistful, days-gone-by underscore by musical supervisor and arranger Candida Caldicott that sets a tone for this weighty drama, a flesh-and-blood piece as only playwright Jez Butterworth and director Sam Mendes, of the Tony-winning The Ferryman, could envision.
That play took on “the troubles” that beset Northern Ireland in the early Eighties. This one is a more intimate family drama through which Mendes brilliantly keeps a large cast circling through two time periods and turntable set, tumbledown lodgings at England’s Blackpool resort known as the Seaview. There is is no sea view, however, and the outlook is grim in 1976, as matriarch Veronica lays dying upstairs, and unseen. Three of her four daughters have gathered to send her off, possibly with a mercy-killing dose of morphine. Unable to agree on much, however, a checkered past rapidly interferes with the present. The siblings are Jill (Helena Wilson), a self-effacing, self-proclaimed virgin at 32 who maintains mom and the rabbit warren of a hotel, whose homely rooms are named after American states; the sharp-tongued Gloria (Leanne Best), who bosses everyone around, and the conciliatory Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond), who plays peacemaker. It’s a losing proposition, however, as everyone including assorted husbands, hangers-on, and teen kids falls out in one way or another. A major bone of contention is the absence of the fourth sister, Joan, who is said to be flying in from California. Joan was apparently mom’s favorite…but no one has seen her in at least twenty years.
In 1955, Veronica (Laura Donnelly) drills the girls in Andrews Sisters routines, which she insists will whisk them to the London Palladium and the fame she craves for her downtrodden family. Widowed during the war Veronica lives in the past and lives for the future but is blinkered about what’s in front of her, namely the resentments of her daughters, who chafe at her restrictions. (Let’s hear it for the girls–the young Joan of Lara McDonnell, Jill of Nicola Turner, Gloria of Nancy Allsop, and Ruby of Sophia Ally.) There are humorous scenes of rebellion (this is where the chain-smoking of 1976 originates) but the stern Veronica is also loving, to a fault. The cloistered ignorance she enforces conceals a house of cards, which collapses when a hard-nosed American talent scout quizzes her about Elvis Presley (a singer she doesn’t know) then turns his attention toward Joan, the eldest. His interest in her, and only her, leads to a private audition in an upstairs room–what happens there is left to our imagining, but the armor of Veronica’s naïveté is shattered.
First things first–Donnelly is spectacular in this. When Joan does make her belated appearance it’s her again, in late hippie SoCal garb and an accent to match. Apparently Butterworth (her husband) rewrote the last act on the show’s journey from the West End but her transformation from Veronica, who recalls Judy Garland and Susan Hayward from the WWII-era movies of better days, to the fragile, sarcastic Joan is seamless, startling, and intensely moving. The costumes of Rob Howell (also responsible for the forlorn set, including a broken jukebox) and wigs, hair and makeup design of Campbell Young Associates has something to do with this of course but both flights of performers are tremendous. There’s not a weak link in the bunch but I must say that when Lovibond (hmm, “love bond,” an apt name for this play!), whose Ruby seems to be building toward an anxiety attack, goes and has one I all but leapt out of my seat to render aid. (Among the youths credit to Allsop, who’s good but not quite good enough performing choreographer Ellen Kane’s old-time dance routines, a carefully enacted deficiency that becomes a plot point and a resentment that Best carries with the character into adulthood.)
It’s important that the theater, like every art form, progress. Someone will figure out how to address artificial intelligence unless it decides to level all the world’s stages in the interim. In the meantime we have The Hills of California, a perfectly constructed play from one of our finest playwrights, with an aching heart and burning soul. No notes!
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