Shaw Festival
Through October 26
ENCHANTED APRIL Festival Theatre/Shaw Festival
By Augustine Warner
My view of the Shaw Festival's “Enchanted April” will always be dogged by the weather.
In Act One, we had rain outside the theater and rain inside, as Lotty Wilton (Moya O'Connell) and Rose Arnott (Tara Rosling) plot an escape from the endless rain of 1922 London, in the aftermath of World War I.
They have both seen an ad for rent April rental of an Italian castle on the Mediterranean and suddenly want to be there.
Without checking with proprietary husbands, they rent.
Act Two?
Well, that's when the curtain rose and stuck because the storm outside had turned into a lighting-filled monsoon and the power had shut off and the emergency generator had kicked and the power came back on and the generator went off and the power went off.
Lights flickered and went off and came on and it was close to chaos.
The cast is filled with long-term professionals and they handled it as well as possible.
They never missed a beat as lights went on and off, delivering their lines with as straight a face as possible although Marla McLean (Lady Caroline Bramble) did break up as second act opened and stalled.
This is a story told and re-told on stage and screen from Elizabeth von Arnim's seminal novel.
This is the Matthew Barber stage version.
A widow and a survivor of the personal turmoil of the terrible war years, von Arnim was ahead of her time with the feminist attitudes in the show.
Both Mrs. Wilton and Mrs. Arnott love their husbands, although they would just like a little equality in their marriages.
Arnott (Patrick Galligan) is an unsuccessful poet under his name and a very successful novelist under a pen name.
Wilton (Jeff Meadows) is a family solicitor.
The two women persuade Lady Caroline and Mrs. Graves (Donna Belleville) to share the rent on the castle owned by artist Antony Wilding (Kevin McGarry).
When the four are together at San Salvatore it's everything they expected from the beach and the sea to the riot of wisteria on the walls.
Lotty runs wild on the sea and the flowers and Rose misses her husband and Lady Caroline drinks and Mrs. Graves is obnoxious.
It all works out and many lives are straightened out and a couple move in different directions.
Designer William Schmuck contributed a thoroughly depressing women's club in a damp and thoroughly depressing post-war London for the first act and a gloriously Italian riot of stone and flowers for the second act, with Kevin Lamotte's gloomy lighting in London and bright, sunny Italian sunshine in the second act.
This is probably all a wonderful show with undoubtedly good direction from the Shaw's boss Jackie Maxwell.
I will probably never know, after the struggle of Mother Nature's electricity and Nikola Tesla's electricity produced a stuttering and jerking second act.
There is undoubtedly a good show here, judging by the first act.
You can probably take the gamble of seeing “Enchanted April” since I can't believe a storm like this gully washer will hit again.
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