Lively, inventive ‘Vanity Fair’ pulls out all the stops at ACT
“Never be too good, nor too bad. The world will punish you for both.”
Such is the self-styled sage advice of the imperious Miss Crawley in “Vanity Fair,” Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation of the 1848 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray currently playing at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.
On the one hand, it’s just one of many pithy epigrams of a character who’s known as much for her hypocrisies as for the impunity afforded by her wealth. On the other hand, it very nicely sums up the story of the story’s pair of heroines, brazenly ambitious Becky Sharp, clawing her way up from relative poverty into high society, and sentimental and overly generous Amelia Sedley, born to privilege.
Like Thackeray’s framing device of a puppet show, Hamill’s version is a play within a play — a seedy English music hall entertainment with some singing and occasional dancing. The small ensemble plays many parts, with a whole lot of men playing women and women playing men.
Dan Hiatt presides over the action as the sardonic troupe Manager, tantalizing the audience and occasionally chiding both Becky and Amelia, who seldom stand for his moralizing. Hiatt is also magnificently compelling as the aforementioned Miss Crawley and sinister as a libertine nobleman.
Alexander Dodge’s scenic design is of a deeply decayed and crumbling faux proscenium with “Strand Musick Hall” printed above — an amusing detail because the show is in fact not at ACT’s Strand Theater but at the larger Geary Theater. (The ACT MFA students will, however, be performing Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” at the Strand’s upstairs space the Rueff during the “Vanity Fair” run.) The production is a co-production with Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where it closed at the end of March.
Director Jessica Stone keeps the pace wonderfully lively, with jaunty music by sound designer Jane Shaw.
A few characters are played by small cutout puppets, and crowd scenes are sometimes peopled by life-size cutouts. Bits of scenery are represented by backgrounds on rollers, or simply by a relatively small framed painting of a mansion.
Rebekah Brockman is indomitably adaptive and forceful in leaping toward everything she wants as the mischievously flirtatious, calculating Becky, while Maribel Martinez is openheartedly trusting and benevolently stoic as Amelia.
The others all shift briskly between many parts. Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan is swaggeringly boorish as Amelia’s soldier fiance, George Osborne, and Anthony Michael Lopez wears soulful heartbrokenness on his sleeve as George’s conscientious friend Dobbin, whose hopelessly unrequited pining for Amelia embarrasses all concerned.
Adam Magill is amiably impish
as Amelia’s aged father, his long legs crooked and crablike, and full of roguish joie de vivre as the man whom Becky sweeps off his feet. Vincent Randazzo childishly pouts as Amelia’s idler brother Jos and is an amusingly lively presence as the gleefully crude Sir Pitt Crawley, while he’s almost vanishingly restrained as George’s mercilessly severe father.
The adaptation takes considerable liberties with Thackeray’s tale, greatly compressing events to make them more chaotically dramatic. Rather than stumbling into marriage hoping for the best with financial ruin soon to follow, the central couples know full well the consequences and choose love anyway, which is a major change and a powerful one.
Hamill takes a story about society’s judgments of transgressions, whether real or merely rumored, and makes it explicitly defiant against all condemnation. As entertained as we may be by the roller coaster of the two unlikely friends’ rises and falls of fortune — and it’s very entertaining indeed — we’re reminded repeatedly that we’re in no position to judge them.