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A VERY CLEVER APPROACH Review by: Beth M, Jan 14, 2008 |
REFLECTIONS ON “OUR LEADING LADY”
By Beth Mandelbaum
What do Kander and Ebb’s “Curtains” and Charles Busch’s “Our Leading Lady” have in common?: a theater company, a theater, a leading lady, a murder, accusations, and investigations; and both are tributes to those special people who make the magic of theater happen.
At the beginning of Kander and Ebb’s musical Curtains, the leading lady of the Broadway bound musical ... read more “Robbin’ Hood of The Old West” is mysterious murdered during the opening night of its out-of town try-out. It is the job of Lieutenant Frank Cioffi, wonderfully played by David Hyde Pierce, to investigate the crime, in which everyone in the cast has become a suspect, and as a result all are sequestered at the Colonial Theater in Boston. As the delightful investigation proceeds, members of the theatrical team are eliminated as suspects until the Lieutenant reaches the inevitable conclusion!
Toward the end of Charles Busch’s Our Leading Lady, we find a similar scenario: the location in now Washington DC, and the cast members of the now legendary and infamous performance of the comedy ‘Our American Cousin” at which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, are similarly sequestered at the Ford theater, and interrogated by Major Hopwood about their possible role in the tragedy. (The leading Lady of “Our American Cousin,” Laura Keene, had been cleared of having any part in the assassination the evening before.).
As stated in David Finkle’s review of Our Leading Lady in Theatermania, “Busch has penned a valentine to actors…” And Charles Isherwood observes: “’Our Leading Lady’…is informed by a deep love of show business."
I would like to add on the above subject, that, akin to Man In Chair in The Drowsy Chaperone, Curtains’s leading man has a love affair with musical theater, which transforms times of “feeling blue” and the experience of emptiness at the center of his life into feelings of begin happy, alive and hopeful again. Theater is indeed a panacea for sadness and loneliness that never fails to uplift and raise one’s spirits.
In Our Leading Lady, we are shown the life and relationships of a regional theatrical troup during their preparations for the ill fated performance of Our American Cousin and during the aftermath of the tragedy. We see the bravada of Laura Keene, the “actress-manager and visiting star” strut her stuff, ego fully intact, and with no sign of humility, as she tries to whip into shape the group of regional actors who, for the most part, she finds dreadfully inferior to those she has worked with in her city slicker experience of running a repertory company n New York (which we come to find out was actually a major failure).
Much of Act One, set backstage, consists of barbs flying between Ms. Keene and the actors as they try to rehearse for the special performance at which President Lincoln and the First Lady will be in attendance. This quality of this performance becomes an issue of extraordinary importance to Ms Keene, as she will have the opportunity to perform for the President of the United States.
Laura Keene has a secret. She has a strong personal agenda in coming to Washington. She is politicking to revitalize her failed career by taking over the Ford Theater and bringing in actors of her choice, with the idea of canning, for want of a better word, the dedicated, though far from brilliant actors, in the current company, with one exception, an actor with whom she is having an affair (another secret). This begins to leak to the company who are naturally feeling very insecure about their jobs and their futures. Ms. Keene assures them that there is absolutely no truth to this, though the audience knows better.
At the end of the act, we suddenly see a man who we have not seen before on the stage. He shouts out the familiar “sic simper tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants”) and then we hear the |
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I saw this show with:
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