AISLE SAY Berkshires

LIVING ON LOVE


by Joe DiPietro
Based on the play Peccadillo by Garson Kanin
Directed by Kathleen Marshall
Starring Renee Fleming and Douglas Sills

Williamstown Theatre Festival, July 16-26

Reviewed by Joel Greenberg

 

Living on Love, currently running at the Williamstown Theatre Festival through July 26, is the ‘straight’ acting debut for Renee Fleming. The vehicle supporting her, and the wonderfully balanced ensemble of actors who share the stage with ample opportunity to show themselves to best advantage, is a tad musty and a wee bit cloying in its predictable series of set-ups and punchlines. But in spite of these flaws, the production is charming, buoyant and among the best rehearsed I’ve seen at the festival. Perhaps this speaks to a planned, or hoped-for, later life. But whatever the reasons may be, there is great pleasure to be taken from seeing all the elements in sync and all the working parts well integrated.

 

The play, written by Joe DiPietro, and based on an earlier play, Peccadillo, by Garson Kanin, concerns an opera star, referred to as La Diva (Ms. Fleming), and her maestro husband (Douglas Sills). Each is consumed by extreme narcissism and neither possesses the capacity to see beyond their oversized egos. Their staff of two older men (Blake Hammond and Scott Robertson) lives to serve and pamper. The central conflict revolves around a young writer (Justin Long) and an equally young book editor (Anna Chlumsky) who take on the task of ghostwriting each artist’s autobiography. In a world where time exists for the soprano and her maestro to do as, and when, they please, there is little or no opportunity for the youngsters to complete their assignments.

 

The play is set in the late 1950’s, when references to Renata Tebaldi and Maria Callas are grist for La Diva’s paranoia, a paranoia that is explained late in the play as a terror of ageing and being supplanted by the next great talent. DiPietro manages to combine humour and pathos with this revelation. The maestro focuses his anxieties on the competition he feels between himself and Leonard Bernstein. His torment is treated with more humour than pathos. It’s a tidy structure although it feels like a theatrical artifact from a bygone era. And perhaps it is this quality that releases the audience to laugh and giggle from start to finish. It’s as though they’ve seen the play before or that an old television situation comedy has been transposed to the stage.

 

The care with which the production has been assembled is impressive. And the company couldn’t be better. Chlumsky and Long, as the young writers, endow cardboard characters with humanity that the script itself doesn’t. Hammond and Robertson, as the Tweedledum and Tweedledee valets, get maximum mileage with every entrance and exit. That they hold the audience through their final scene together speaks to their skill more than it speaks to the playwriting.

 

Ms. Fleming is thoroughly charming and a very good sport. She swans about the set (beautifully realized by Derek McLane) and invokes every cliché of overheated egotism. Her comic timing is precise and her self-mockery is disarming. The scene in which she admits the fear of growing past her celebrity is genuinely moving, but how could it not be with a diva playing La Diva? It’s impossible to believe that Renee Fleming is anything but a sweetheart offstage

 

But her performance, reassuring as it is, wouldn’t sit so well without a leading man to balance her and to provide her the foundation to swoop and swirl about the set. Douglas Sills, playing her husband and maestro, does just that. He is the engine of this machine. And it’s well-oiled machine ably directed by Kathleen Marshall.

 

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