While we don't have film versions of the original Shakespeare productions or of Ethel Merman in Gypsy, we do have a classic film with Hepburn repeating her stage performance. Tracy Lord was constructed around Hepburn's vocal mannerisms and physical style so it's very difficult to stray too far from her performance and still be effective -- Lord IS Hepburn. Hepburn was mannered and almost a cartoon of rarified dignity and that was written into the role as well (look at the way Dexter continually takes the wind out of her sails and takes her down a peg whenever she's gets too full of herself). The Lord character actually makes fun of the Hepburn persona and one of the chief reasons it was so successful (and helped her get rid of the "box office" poison label) was that it showed that she had the ability to laugh at herself and even make fun of herself. Being willing to play an overblown Hepburn caricature, humanzed her a bit and made her more popular with audiences than ever before and saved her career.
Others have successfully played Tracy Lord in the 60 years since it premiered and been able to do so without doing a Hepburn impression. However, Hepburn's successors in the role, notably Blythe Danner in the last Broadway revival, still possessed a similarly effortless air of sophistication, haughty carriage and
mastery over drawing room comedy technique.
The humor in Barry's plays (as well as Coward's plays) is very specific and understated and while one doesn't have to do an exact imitation of the 20s/30s acting style to make it work, doing too contemporary a take on the material undermines the comedy. I've seen less-stylized "21st century" updates of comedies by Wilde and Coward with companies of first rate actors and while they were certainly interesting, they nevertheless managed to lose about half of the laughs in the script. If you punch the "jokes" and play it broad, you miss most of what's funny in the first place. These plays were deftly and delicately constructed and half of the laughs come from nuanced and subtle readings of the lines (lines that on the page don't appear funny). If the actor doesn't know how to emphasize to proper word within a given line and how to time the line reading with an appropriate bit of stage business, then the laugh will disappear.
I remember sitting through a contemporary re-thinking of "The Importance of Being Earnest" a couple of seasons go and cringing as I saw the actors lose laugh after laugh after laugh because they didn't have the technique to read the lines properly. I went home and popped in the DVD of the '52 film version with Dame Edith Evans and Michael Regrave and Jane Greenwood and watched them nail every single laugh in the text -- they literally got four or five laughs for every one that had happened in the production I'd seen that night.
I wish Spacey and Messing the best with this production at the Old Vic. Perhaps, it'll be terrific. We shall see.
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
Updated On: 1/31/05 at 06:48 PM
