The local summer stock season is well underway with the opening of Huntington Artistic Director Nicholas Martin's revival of British playwright Benn Levy's classic farce, "Springtime for Henry". Perhaps the show couldn't be fitted into the Williamstown schedule this season. Indeed, this exercise in comic fluff was preceded earlier in the month by Huntington Associate Scott Edmiston's retread of Noel Coward's "Hay Fever", a superior piece of writing from the same genre. Moreover Huntington/Williamstown wunderkind Darko Tresnjak will be doing "Hay Fever" for Westport this summer. Perhaps the community theatres that have been keeping such scripts on the boards lo these many years were on to something.
Just what the appeal of such artificial comedy might be is unclear. Certainly many actors enjoy tackling parts where subtext can be almost ignored and style is foremost. Audiences enjoy dialogue where the pauses are for comic effect, not imponderable significance. Unfortunately, really carrying off such a piece requires a brisk pace, impeccable comic timing, and vocal agility. While the current performers, all bright young actors who have worked with Martin before, are capable professionals by today's standards, they lack the grounding in farce and the seasoning on stage that can only really be achieved by playing the stuff night after night in sufficient variety for an audience which expects to laugh.
As the title character, Henry Dewlip, Christopher Fitzgerald has been directed to add various Chaplinesque business to the role, which might be more effective if the other three actors had similar and relevant role models. Jeremy Shamos, as Henry's old school chum and present best friend, John Jelliwell, seems to have taken his inspiration from the cast of Monty Python. He's no John Cleese, but who is? Both actors played against each other in last year's "Behold the Sons of Ulster..." under Martin's direction both here and in New York. Fitzgerald was the lone Catholic lad, Shamos the failed Protestant preacher; a dramatic confrontation not of much use for this show, even for friends. There's not much chemistry between the pair this time.
The women in this quartet also seem to inhabit different genres. Mia Barron, who played Emily Dunn in "Heartbreak House" early last season, vamps around as Julia Jelliwell, John's wife, who's been carrying on with Henry. Her femme fatale, while certainly attractive, doesn't delight. The part seems driven more by boredom than joy. Jessica Stone, seen last season as Betty in "Betty's Summer Vacation" plays Miss Smith, Henry's new and very proper secretary. Her staccato approach quickly wears thin as a comic persona. The result of these four varied approaches to the play works against its farcical premises. Everyone makes their points, and gets a few laughs, but the whole things never comes together, even at the climax. None of the characters is appealing enough to make the outcome satisfying.
The problem is not that this is a period British comedy, which it barely is. Benn Levy wrote the piece in 1931, at the beginning of the Great Depression while working in the New York theatre. The show premiered in summer stock upstate as "The Soul of Henry Dewlip", a more evocative title, then was remounted for the holiday season in New York. As a four handed, one set show, the retitled "Springtime..." fit the finances of the period, and as a brittle farce with naughty implications "... Henry" was a perfect escape. In 1934, as with most minor Broadway successes the play was filmed, and might have gotten on the boards now and then thereafter. However, the show was produced in Hollywood by veteran stage and film comedian Edward Everett Horton, who then proceeded to tour the old thing until 1959, by which point "SforH" was a curiosity rather than a play.
"Springtime for Henry" is really an amoral farce which involves four stereotypical Brits--as seen by Americans--in a melodramatic romance more like those seen on this side of the pond than those typified by Noël Coward's plays in London. Its playboy hero has inherited a motor car company and by the second act decides to run it. Not the sort of thing one would do, don't you know. His two love interests--that we meet, his best friend's wife and his secretary--are curiously singleminded in their intentions. Miss Smith turns out to have been married, has a child, and shot her French husband because poor Pierre couldn't help bringing his mistresses home to tea. The French courts excused her; a bit of Froggy bashing once again good for a meaningless laugh. Henry's best friend and school chum has a scheme to sell him carburetors which backfires when Miss Smith reforms the playboy. This is not strictly drawing room comedy. And the upshot of it all, which has Miss Smith and John Jelliwell, who met cute early in the play, going off together, while Henry and Julia Jelliwell decide have a go, belongs more to Feydeau than the West End.
In hands less content with the obvious, this revival could have been a comic whirl. The Huntington production, smartly directed, well costumed by IRNE awardee Michael Krass, and prettily designed by James Noone , previously praised for his monumental "Dead End" set, is merely pleasant, and occasionally shrill. It falls between four stools against its sunny yellow set with nothing outside the windows. Very few risks have been taken and there's a leisurely air to the exercise, which would do for summer stock. Somehow, more was expected at the former Repertory, where the play's first director, Arthur Sircom, performed in the '20s.