Within no more than seconds of Natasha Chivers’ lights going up on Rob Howell’s foreboding four-story set for The Hills of California, never-miss director Sam Mendes lets it be known he has his firm grip on Jez Butterworth’s new and acclaimed play in its transfer from London’s West End.
It’s an indefinable sense of unfolding satisfaction that often instantaneously accompanies exceptional works. Happy to say it struck as soon as agitated Jill (Helena Wilson) began a concerned conversation with nurse Penny (Ta’Rea Campbell) in the cluttered parlor of run-down Blackpool resort Seaview, and its four floors of long staircases rising ominously to signal eventually bleak revelations.
The newest play by Butterworth—author of the Tony-winning Ferryman—is a dramedy including music and dance, taking place in 1955 and 1976. Jill is one of the four Webb sisters intent on saying goodbye to their dying mother, who remains unseen on a bed behind a second-floor door. Jill is the one sister who has never left the house.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★★ review here.]
On the other hand, Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) arrives with what she regards as her ho-hum husband Dennis (Brian Dick). Not too long after they darken the Seaview entrance, Gloria (Leanne Best) barges in, a mass of long-held grudges fueling her, with children Patty (Nancy Allsop) and Anthony (Liam Bixby).
Joan, who 21 years earlier defected to those California hills, is supposedly on her way but has run into travel problems. Jill insists Joan will return; she’s promised her dying Mom that the missing sister, long her mother’s favorite, will get to the death bed in the nick of time. (Does Joan get there or doesn’t she is a plot tantalizer; for full appreciation of Butterworth’s aims, audience members are advised to avoid consulting the program’s cast list.)
The Hills of California, then, is the tenebrous tale of often resentful siblings, their bonds sometimes intricately steadfast, sometimes intricately damaged by what they’ve endured in a household with a missing father and an ambitious mother. Make that a rampaging, Momma Rose-like stage mother, Veronica (Laura Donnelly).
As siblings everywhere will attest, Butterworth has landed on a broad and emotionally rich subject. His accomplishment is how he endlessly creates situations in which, over three acts, the sisters consistently align and realign in defense of and in defiance of each other.
They behave similarly in several flashbacks to the sisters’ adolescence when Veronica isn’t merely in good health but on a relentless mission. She’s convinced that her girls will become the world’s successors to the Andrews Sisters. To demonstrate Veronica’s hardcore belief, Butterworth uses the 1955 flashbacks to bring on young Joan (Lara McDonnell), young Gloria (Nancy Allsop), young Jill (Nicola Turner), and Young Ruby (Sophia Ally). While they interact with each other not unlike they do in 1976, Veronica repeatedly drills them on their routines—choreographer Ellen Kane and music supervisor Candida Caldicott at the ready with, for one, the 1940s sisters’ “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.”
Helped by Jack Larkin (Bryan Dick), a conniving performer with connections, Veronica weathers money-crushing setbacks when an American manager, Luther St. John (David Wilson Barnes), agrees to drop by for an audition. Not impressed with what he sees (the subsequent so-so turn cleverly staged by Kane), he allows that the one sister with promotable talent is Joan. After some discussion, Veronica and he agree to a strictly private session with Joan, during which she’ll render her interpretation of the Nat King Cole “When I Fall in Love”—Cole a St. John client, as Butterworth neatly frames it.
The decision’s outcome, left in the reverberating air for most of the remainder of the play, provides the production’s central drama, if hardly its intermittent humor. The discussions, the arguments, the silences, the relived and intensifying grudges, the temporary alliances between and among the central characters—while other colorful figures caught in the two-era maelstrom swirl around—constitute Butterworth’s wise depiction of family dynamics and how over tortuous time they may or may not work out.
Of the large cast, it’s necessary to stress the quality performances of all concerned. First by length and commitment to her goal is Donnelly, who tackles the potent role with both hands clenched. (She also serves eerily in another crucial bit.) Those playing the 1976 and 1955 Webbs are unfailingly strong, Lovibond possessing maybe the best pipes. Other standouts among the full ensemble standouts are Ta-Rea Campbell as seen-it-all nurse Penny, Barnes as shrewd manager St. John, Richard Lumsden as in-house piano accompanist Joe Fogg, and Bryan Dick as both Dennis and wise-cracking Jack Larkin.
(One caveat: The actors speak in North England accents that can call for close listening. Daniele Lydon is the UK dialect coach, Kate Wilson the US vocal coach.)
By the way, with The Hills of California Butterworth spins on The Ferryman. Again, it’s a welcome spin, wherein he suggests the possibility, if not the guarantee, of benighted families ultimately reaching acceptable endings. To that point, he inserts “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” invoking the promise or broken promise of familial dreams, whatever they be. Do they ever come true here? The answer involves a must-see trip to The Hills of California, instantly an early entry into the best-play-of-the-season sweepstakes.
The Hills of California opened September 29, 2024 at the Broadhurst Theatre and runs through December 22. Tickets and information: thehillsofcalifornia.com
