Where are you when we need you, Noël Coward? Why, you’re right there at the Irish Repertory Theatre. You’re peering out from an upstage bust at Love, Noël, a revue, fashioned by Barry Day from the several books on Coward he’s published. Throughout it, cabaret figures Steve Ross and KT Sullivan can sashay their by-now-well-established considerable cabaret stuff.
Just what is this pressing need for the Master’s presence? The stirring event follows a season of musicals marked by at best mediocre original scores (with the exception always of revivals Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady). Or no original score. That disappointing list includes the highly suspicious first musical of the 2019-2020 season, jukebox tuner Moulin Rouge. Worse news: at the moment not a single musical announced for the coming season will have an original score.
So to bring musical lovers to their assailed senses here comes the ever-dapper-in-form-and-work Coward to remind and reassure audiences of a time when wit, innuendo, melody and craft prevailed rather than the carelessness and vulgarity that seems to be the score-der of the present day. Granted, it may be right to except Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop now and new at Playwrights Horizons. But wait: the metatheatrical enterprise follows the adventures of a composer-lyricist harking back to happier musical-comedy times.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
Anyway, here are Sullivan and Ross skipping merrily through the magnificent Coward songbook. They do their enchanting chanting between readings culled most from Day’s eye-opening collection, The Letters of Noel Coward. Many of the letters compiled were darted to Coward’s mother Violet as well as, quite often, to chums like Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.
The emphasis on the ladies gives Sullivan the chance to do some truly impressive impersonations, the sort of forays she doesn’t often go into in others of her intimate-room performance. Ross sticks to standing in for Coward, Ross’ signature performing cool a nice shade on Coward. N.B.: he never once lights a cigarette, much less inserts it in a cigarette holder.
In addition to the letters, Coward sends his love by way of 22 songs, with Ross and Sullivan finding their keen way into them. Ross’ sprechstimme version of “Mrs. Worthington” is a terrific display of mounting comic anger and insistence. Sullivan‘s take on “If Love Were All,” often thought to be Coward’s most autobiographical number, has a splendid wistfulness about it. Her “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” is right up there with the Coward and Elaine Stritch renditions. Ross does what has to be another Coward-revealing-himself number, “I Travel Alone,” with the proper poignancy.
The most familiar Coward ballads are here, the undercurrents always hinting at painful nostalgia. “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “Someday I’ll Find You,” “You Were There,” and “I’ll See You Again” materialize. It may be that these songs exude the fragrant aroma of a bygone time, but they still have the chilled passion Coward often exhibited.
Apparently, Coward was once asked why, since he loved Paris and even performed there in the native tongue, never memorialized the city in a song. He had but rarely exposed it—“I Wanted to Show You Paris,” sung by Ross and Sullivan. After Sullivan sings one verse of “Mad About the Boy” with romantic fervor, Ross trots out a suppressed, fun-loving Coward verse in which a man sings how mad he is about the very same boy.
Charlotte Moore directs the players on a sleek blue-and-grey set James Morgan designed with—it should be needless to say—a grand piano upstage center. Though Ross remains at the piano for the most part, and Sullivan moves elegantly about it, they both act as if they’re at a marvelous party. But be aware that, though alluded to, Cowards’ hilarious “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” isn’t intoned—after perhaps much deliberation.
Oh, well, you can’t have everything. It may be that Coward is regarded by some as losing contemporary meaning—this despite his being an ambassador of songwriting expertise that should never go out of date. The truth is, he is still as timely a pundit for our benighted age as anyone would want. After all, he’s the one who said, “The higher the building the lower the morals.” And doesn’t that bring to mind a certain proposed Moscow tower and its sorry proposer?
Love, Noel opened August 1, 2019, at Irish Repertory Theatre, and runs through August 25. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
