Review: `An Ideal Husband’
Opened July 5, Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, Orinda
Julie Eccles is Gertrude Chiltern and Stacy Ross is Laura Chevely in California Shakespeare Theater’s production of An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. Photos by Kevin Berne
Ferocity marries wit in Cal Shakes’ lively `Husband’
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Nothing ages like happiness, or so Oscar Wilde tells us in An Ideal Husband. But you’ll be hard pressed to leave California Shakespeare Theater’s production without being happy for at least a few hours.
The combination of Wilde and director Jonathan Moscone, as we saw in the 2004 Cal Shakes production of The Importance of Being Earnest, is a potent one, and the marriage makes for an ideal Husband.
Moscone understands how to keep Wilde’s plates spinning. Over here, amid a swirl of “beautiful idiots,” as Wilde calls them, is broad, silly comedy with great comic one-liners dropping like rain at Wimbledon, and over here is a more serious drama about how the personal and political end up being the same thing.
It’s amazing that Moscone can get such big laughs and then delve so deeply into real-life emotions. Credit his superb cast for scaling the heights and depths so perfectly.
I have fond memories of Stephen Wadsworth’s production of An Ideal Husband at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1995. That production, if memory serves, was all elegance and sharp angles. The wit sliced and the venom was toxic on contact.
Moscone’s production is funnier and more deeply felt – an even greater accomplishment when you consider he’s doing it outside. On opening night, the weather was glorious: warm and clear, with a pair of hawks squawking and diving over the stage.
But it was not easy to be distracted from the production. Annie Smart’s set (lit with precision by Scott Zielinski) adheres to the drawing room conventions of Wilde’s play but manages to open it up to indicate life beyond the area of central focus.
Julie Eccles, as usual, commands the stage as the virtuous Gertrude Chiltern, a woman who has put her politician husband (Michael Butler, below left) so high on a pedestal he has no choice but to come crashing down on top of her. It’s interesting to note that in the Berkeley Rep production 13 years ago, Eccles charmed as Mabel, the sparky sister-in-law who’s too smart for her own good.
As Gertrude, Eccles plays beautifully opposite Butler’s conflicted Sir Robert, a noble, upright politico with a dirty secret in his past. She’s even better opposite Stacy Ross’ Laura Chevely, a character whose very name oozes danger.
Mrs. Chevely, fresh from Vienna (and costumed by Meg Neville as something out of a gorgeous Klimt painting), wants to accomplish several things: to blackmail Sir Robert (she has an incriminating letter in her possession) and she wants another husband after the first two failed her. She’s one of those smart, dreadful people whom Wilde describes “treating life as sordid speculation.”
To read the complete review, please visit my Examiner.com theater page here.
An Ideal Husband continues through July 27 at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, just off the Gateway/Shakespeare Festival exit on Highway 24, one mile east of the Caldecott Tunnel in Orinda. Tickets are $32-$62. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org for information. Cal Shakes provides a free shuttle to and from the Orinda BART station and the theater.