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
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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