Excellent cast boosts Pygmalion-inspired ‘Educating Rita’
Many years ago as an undergraduate majoring in theater, I had the good fortune to see Laurie Metcalf and Austin Pendleton in a production of “Educating Rita,” Willy Russell’s version of the Pygmalion myth, which you may know better from the musical “My Fair Lady.” Now, 30 years later, I was able to see it again.
West End Productions — Albuquerque’s newest theater company — is currently reviving Russell’s comedy, which was originally a hit on the West End of London in 1980, and shortly after made into a movie.
A young working-class woman from Liverpool, determined to better herself, undergoes tutorials with a boozy failed poet and literature professor. By the end of the play, she is a new woman, quoting Blake by heart and enunciating in the refined diction of the upper classes.
The play suggests Rita might have been more authentic before her education, and while Frank initially scolds her for lacking objective analysis in her papers, by the end he misses her unique, if decidedly unacademic, style. (Asked how she would stage the notoriously difficult “Peer Gynt,” she hands in a paper of one sentence: “Do it on the radio.”)
Russell himself knows the humane value of a liberal arts education, and I don’t think he means to denigrate the very education that did so much for him. Ultimately, the play is more about the transformation that Rita induces in Frank than the one he facilitates for her. He is smitten with the bubbly hairdresser who so unexpectedly walks into his office, and to see her grow and change is discomfiting for him. She is authentic and unique at the start of the play, certainly, but her education in the humanities only enhances her lively personality; above all, she becomes independent.
Because I was out of town during the play’s opening weekend, I saw the preview performance the night before opening with a small audience of about a dozen people.
Unfortunately, the excellent cast — including Jessica Osbourne as Rita and Frederick Ponzlov as Frank — was not quite ready to open the night I saw the play. The actors frequently had trouble getting the words out (especially Ponzlov), as if they were not totally memorized, which dampened the effect. In fact, just such a problem spoiled the climactic scene. When an actor stumbles on a line, particularly in a key moment, the rhythm and effect are sacrificed. Fortunately, these actors are quite talented and they will hit the mark.
Casey Mraz’s set design would have been excellent, except for one salient miscalculation. Frank is a professor of English literature, constantly quoting Charles Dickens, E.M. Forester, D.H. Lawrence and other titans of English lit, yet the two bookcases were stacked with contemporary popular books like David Icke’s “The Biggest Secret” and Leon Uris’ “Armageddon.” This was completely out of character and distracting. I couldn’t read many of the titles, but you really can judge a book by its cover, and these were not classics.
Otherwise, the set captures perfectly the office of a university English professor in the years before the digital revolution, from the old typewriter on the table to the Botticelli print flanked by two old bookshelves, which were perfect except for the books within.
“Educating Rita” is playing through May 21 at the VSA North Fourth
Art Center, 4904 Fourth NW. Go to westendproductions.org or call 410-8524 for reservations.