WHERE’S THE FAIRY DUST?
Mistakes in casting and direction create significant problems for ‘Anne & Gilbert, The Musical’
Reviewer says mistakes in casting, direction create significant problems for ‘Anne & Gilbert, The Musical’
It is a testament to the difficulty of bringing a company together to make good theatre that you can have a production of a play which one year shimmers like the Lake of Shining Waters and the next year needs some work — a lot of work.
The responsibility for that work rests squarely on the director’s shoulders. The director casts the play (or should at least be intimately involved in the decision), and the old adage is that if you cast well, your job is half done.
The director of “Anne & Gilbert, The Musical,” Catherine O’Brien, is the person responsible for how the whole production unfolds before an audience. Good writers craft moments carefully for effect, but this production throws away dozens of nicely crafted moments.
Aside from an overall sense of “flatness” beginning with the opening number (and remember, I saw this play sizzle last year), I kept witnessing actors doing what is called “turning out” (when an actor “cheats” his body so we can see his whole face). Instead of actors discovering the crux of a scene, it looked like a director had been whispering in their ears during rehearsal: “I need you to turn out at this moment”, or “please move stage left at this moment.”
It’s director as traffic cop. And the inevitable result is often actors who seem uncomfortable in their own skin. Case in point is the climactic scene when Gilbert gives Anne the letters from her parents he has discovered (revealing a part of her history she’s been desperate to find). A potentially moving moment was muddled by some very stiff staging.
Mistakes in casting create the most significant problems. If you’re directing a play about a girl named Anne and a guy named Gilbert, and the entire story revolves around Anne and Gilbert falling in love, and I, as an audience member, am having a lot of trouble believing that love is unfolding before me, then your play is in a world of trouble.
If my recollection of being madly in love for the first time is correct, a boy cannot get within five feet of a girl he has a crush on without literally vibrating with excitement. Usually he then has trouble speaking, his hands get kinda clammy (and other things happen which we
can’t discuss in a newspaper). Simply sitting beside your crush is an earth-shattering moment. It should be directed as such in a theatre. We can’t lay all the blame on Jonathan Gysbers (Gilbert) if he hasn’t been guided carefully through such a moment, and in the midst of a song called “Carried Away By Love,” no less!
Clearly this play has good bones established by its creators Jeff Hochhauser, Bob Johnston and Nancy White. But good bones need good directors to put some flesh on them. If you play it for cheap laughs, it will not be truly funny. Real humour is rooted in real human behaviour.
There are a number of actors, including Jayne Peters (Anne) and Jenny Weisz (Diana), who are working hard, struggling valiantly to keep the play moving, and, along with some very charming children, provide some real emotion and vulnerability. But it takes more than two to tango — it takes an entire ensemble connected by a little bit of fairy dust.
It’s rare stuff, that fairy dust. Revisiting this production just proved it.