Review: ARMS AND THE MAN, American Conservatory Theater (Online)
As previously announced, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater opened its online-only 2021 season with the launch of A.C.T. Out Loud, a new series with three classic play readings staged by three visionary directors. Between the series’ opener, Alice Childress’ Trouble in Mind, and Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, A.C.T artistic director Pam MacKinnon introduces the “result of a four day rehearsal process, a digital reading, which will let us behold and laugh along with George Bernard Shaw’s great play Arms and the Man”, available for live streaming and on demand until 18 April.
Using a classic movie opening format with James Cagney’s You’re a Grand Old Flag’, award-winning actor Colman Domingo directs the habile play-within-the-play by opening with a modern decor behind the exquisitely exuberant Allen Darby, lying on his bed and phone scrolling, boringly declaiming “Will this pandemic ever end?” before grabbing Arms and the Man from his bookshelf, beginning to read it aloud and putting on the narrator’s costume. Throughout the two-hour production, Darby alternates funny Russian soldier and grandiloquent narrator, who reads Shaw’s 1894 stage directions and hilarious hyper-detailed character descriptions, with character reactions within Zoom windows shown at the same time.
During the three-act play and its two musical-intermissions (Robert de Cormier’s ‘Hello My Baby’ and Doris Day’s ‘Cuddle Up A Little Closer’), the characters performing, each in their own locations and separate zoom boxes, are clearly having as much fun as much as the audience watching this audacious shavian interpretation, with ingenious video design by editor Luis Garcia and dramaturgy by Joy Meads.
With a snowy digital background, the first act opens in the midst of the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885 opposing Bulgarians against Serbs. The Bulgarian Petkoff family’s heiress, Raina, suddenly finds herself in her boudoir, with an fleeing enemy combatant, Swiss mercenary Captain Bluntschli. Being engaged to flamboyant self-centred Ariel Shafir’s Sergius, she risks her reputation to shelter Bluntschli with her mother’s help. Chaos emerges in the following acts with some well-placed digital effects when Sergius and Mr Petkoff return triumphant, when Avanthika Srinivasan (deliciously cynical as servant Louka) reveals a crucial secret when Captain Bluntschli unexpectedly arrives.
Danny Scheie’s gruffly joyful Papa Petkoff (with a real bird on his shoulder!) and Kimberly Hébert Gregory’s flaunting and vibrant Catherine or Mother Petkoff are remarkably funny. As main characters of this “anti-romantic comedy in three acts'', Allie Marie Evans as ingenue Raina and Phillip James Brannon’s imperturbable Captain Bluntschli make a stunning duo during the boudoir dialogue but seem to fade a little in the following acts.
Colman Domingo has certainly succeeded with this play reading, ending the vaudeville perfectly with “The world is waiting for the sunrise” by Benny Goodman.
**** Four stars
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