In my junior year in college, I heard that a classmate was going to be directing Ernest in Love, a musical version of The Importance of Being Earnest, the comic masterwork by Oscar Wilde. I had never heard of the show, nor indeed had I ever seen or read the original play, but a lot of my friends were auditioning, so I signed up. It wound up being my favorite theatrical experience of my college career, and the show has since occupied a special place in my heart.
So I was thrilled to hear that Irish Repertory Theatre would be mounting a production of Ernest in Love, which opened in December and has since been extended through February 14th. I had never seen the show, only appeared in it, and was hoping to see if it would hold up against my fond recollections.
Not quite. I still found much to admire and enjoy in the show's score, with music and lyrics by Anne Croswell and Lee Pockriss, respectively. But, despite my affection for Ernest, it wasn't quite working for me. I had to wonder: Was it the piece itself that was flawed? Were the performances not quite hitting their Wildean mark? Or had director Charlotte Moore somehow failed to bring all the pieces together to fully evoke the arch and rarefied world of Oscar Wilde?
I think it was a combination of all three. Some have questioned the necessity of turning The Importance of Being Earnest into a musical to begin with. It's an interesting question to ponder: Are there some works, plays in particular, that shouldn't be tampered with? For instance, Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones spent years trying turn Our Town into the musical Grover's Corners. Some said, why bother? The play's just fine the way it is. Well, if you take that reasoning too far, you can talk yourself out of writing any musical adaptation at all. Just because the source material works, does that necessarily mean it could never work as a musical? It's far too facile to say, "Oh, they never should have even tried." No one thought Pygmalion would make a good musical. Rodgers and Hammerstein tried for a year before giving up. Then Lerner and Loewe found a way to make it work, and the result was My Fair Lady.
So, I think Ernest in Love could have worked. In fact, it almost does. The main problem is that many of the numbers are stop-and-sing, and aren't necessary to the progression of the plot. This throws off the pacing of Wilde's farcical goings-on, stopping the show dead when we want it to move forward. In the best musical adaptations, if you remove the songs, the show wouldn't make sense. Too few of the songs in Ernest in Love are crucial to understanding the plot, except perhaps "A Handbag is Not a Proper Mother." In fact, the Irish Rep production does remove two songs from the show -- the opening "Come Raise Your Cup," and the four-character round "Eternal Devotion" -- with very little damage to the narrative. That's poor integration.
As for the production itself, the main liability was the otherwise talented Noah Racey, who is miscast here as Jack Worthing. Racey is known primarily as a dancer, and a fine one at that. He was one of the best things on stage in Curtains, and an absolute pleasure to watch. But his style was wrong for Worthing: too much purposeless movement and not enough solidity. As a sort of compensation, director Moore has added extended dance breaks for Racey, which really didn't work on the small Irish Rep stage, and served to emphasize that Racey wasn't the right choice for the role.
Fortunately, most of the rest of the cast is terrific, particularly the marvelous Beth Fowler, who is simply sensational as Lady Bracknell. Fowler lends an air of class to everything she does, and Ernest in Love is no exception. Also quite strong were Annika Boras as a laser-sharp Gwendolyn, Ian Holcomb as a charmingly louche Algernon, and Katie Fabel as a quirky, borderline maniacal, Cecily. Once the show got fully underway, all the main characters introduced, and the focus pulled away from Racey, the production settled more firmly into the world of Wilde, and the fun began to flow.
NOTE: New Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations require bloggers to disclose when they accept anything of material value related to their blog posts. I received complimentary press tickets to this performance of Ernest in Love.
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