National Post (National Edition)
‘Springtime for Bonaparte’
THE TWIST IN ‘PICTURE THIS’ REVEALS THE SOURCE MATERIAL’S WRITER TO BE AHEAD OF HIS TIME
Picture this. We are in the lobby of a Budapest hotel in the early 1920s. The decor is sumptuous, but the service is terrible. This is because none of the staff are remotely interested in their jobs. They are moonlighting from the impoverished local film industry. The concierge is an unemployed director; the cocktail waitress is a star actress, known locally as the Mary Pickford of Hungary. They are all trying to attract the attention of a visiting movie mogul from the United States who they hope will sweep them off to Hollywood, fortune, fame and work.
Picture This is an adaptation by Morris Panych and Brenda Robins of The Battle of Waterloo, a 1924 play by Melchior Lengyel, a Hungarian author who in the next decade was to hit the Hollywood trail himself, writing among other things the original story for the classic anti-Nazi satire To Be or Not To Be. As staged by Soulpepper, a company that has always been good at goulash, the hotel bears a strong scenic resemblance to the Budapest cosmetics store of the same troupe’s Parfumerie. Ken MacDonald designed both shows, in a style I can best describe as a tastefully merry whirl. The same description will serve for Panych’s direction, as his characters literally fall over themselves and one another in their attempts to catch the eye and ear of the man from lotusland. The acrobatics only enhance the wit of the text; line for line, this is a funnier script than the one that Robins and Adam Pettle wrote for Parfumerie. It is not, however, as well constructed or as fundamentally joyous. The first act is tight, but the second, though still entertaining, feels as if the authors are making it up as they go along.
That second act is set, mostly, on a movie set. When the Hollywood executive, whose name is Red, finally appears in public, he runs into an old acquaintance, a Mr. Brown from Buffalo. The two men knew one another when they were both penniless émigrés to America. Red, unquenchably self-confident, went into pictures; Brown, modest and resigned, went into furs. He’s now modest and retired, and on vacation.
Red insists to the hotel management that his old friend get luxury treatment. A youngish movie producer called Romberg, with lots of ideas and no money, jumps to the conclusion that Mr. Brown must be another Tinseltown big shot, and persuades him to bankroll a picture about, yes, the battle of Waterloo. The furrier ponies up $5,000 — his life’s savings, reluctantly entrusted to him by his wife while she takes off on a side trip of her own.
Five grand isn’t much of a budget for a movie, not even in 1924, not even in Hungary. So it’s no surprise that the picture whose final shooting agonies we witness in Act Two, turns out to be a disaster. There is of course a twist, one in which Lengyel shows himself to have been ahead of his time. His play anticipates such later showbiz lampoons as Once in a Lifetime, one of the greatest American stage comedies; Singin’ in the Rain, the absolute greatest film musical; and, perhaps most impressively of all, that celebrated genre crossover The Producers. I wouldn’t want to give anything away but I would like to observe that the finished Romberg-BrownNapoleon creation might well have been called Springtime for Bonaparte.
Romberg and Brown are here given possible careerbest performances by Jordan Pettle and David Storch respectively. Storch paints a hilariously detailed portrait of uptightness temporarily loosened, like a human umbrella unfolding and then snapping shut again. Pettle, operating at full and unflagging speed, manages to be both eager and diffident; a natural pitchman, he has to be prodded into action by Milli, the waitress, a role that enables Michelle Monteith, in dazzling blond curls, to present a lighter version of the femme fatale she played in Of Human Bondage. She gives, and probably takes, great pleasure in presenting a character who is not a suicidal neurotic.
The romance of Milli and Romberg, apparently a longtime thing, takes centrestage in the second act after being barely noticeable in the first. Milli has attracted, and encouraged, the attentions of at least three other men, with no noticeable dramatic repercussions. That’s flabby architecture all around. Still a parade of the movie industry’s sacred monsters, keeps us happy.
Cliff Saunders, dapper and dyspeptic, is exactly right as one of the men who made Hollywood, while also making millions. Elsewhere we have Robert Persichini as a matinee idol actor with a bloated ego and a frame to match, and Gregory Prest, nervously insistent as another star-in-his-own-mind, reduced to playing both the French and English armies, apparently all on his own. Nancy Palk, rather wasted as the director-turned-concierge-turned director-again, is still good. Brigitte Robinson is in handbag-swinging mode as the fearsome Mrs Brown, Paolo Santalucia is a musician who unaccountably doubles as an office-boy and Robins herself plays two brusque ladies from opposite sides of the movie tracks.
Her collaborator’s own romance with the movies has long been evident; for years now Panych has begun his productions with a projected list of credits. This time, however, his cinematic beginning is most humorously balanced by a cinematic ending. We’re treated, after the curtain call, to footage of the Waterloo movie, including a monstrously unhistorical battlefield tryst between Napoleon and his Josephine, a role played of course by Milli at her most Pickfordian. Picture that.
This is my last regular theatre column for the National Post. You can keep in touch with me at robertmcushman@gmail.com