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Love, Noel: The Letters and Songs of Noel Coward
Reviewed by Neal Weaver
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
Closed
Noel Coward gave new meaning to the term “multi-talented.” He achieved great success as a playwright, actor, director, composer, lyricist, creator of theatrical revues and musicals, novelist, television personality, and cabaret singer, who scored an unlikely hit in Las Vegas. Love, Noel concentrates on Coward’s letters, and gems from the Coward songbook are here deftly and skillfully performed by a pair of consummate professionals: Harry Groener and Sharon Lawrence.
Though the show has a biographical air, it’s really more of an uncritical celebration of the man, his songs and his famous friends. The songs include evergreens like “Someday I’ll Find You,” “I’ll See You Again,” “Mad About the Boy,” and “The Party’s Over Now,” as well as comic turns like “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington,” and “Nina,” the tale of the lady from Argentina who refused to begin the beguine.
Groener plays the master with wry elegance and self-deprecating wit, and Lawrence plays—well, everybody else. She’s apparently willing and able to tackle most anything, playing, in the course of the show, Gertrude Lawrence, Greta Garbo, Lynn Fontanne, Daphne du Maurier, Enid Bagnold, Clemence Dane, Marlene Dietrich, and even George Bernard Shaw.
Coward’s efforts to nurse Marlene through her stormy and unsatisfactory affair with Yul Brynner almost become a one-act play in themselves, and his youthful friendship with writer Esme Wynn, and the death of Gertrude Lawrence from cancer during the run of The King and I are also treated in some depth.
Groener and Lawrence also perform snippets from Coward’s plays, including Private Lives, Design for Living, and the movie Brief Encounter, stirring up considerable emotional power in the process. It’s an elegant and stylish show, but it also manages to be very funny and sometimes unexpectedly moving.
The piece is devised and written by Barry Day, director Jeanie Hackett provides smooth, unobtrusive direction, and the musical director/accompanist is the ever-able Gerald Sternbach.
Lovelace Studio Theater, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. Closed.
