Greater Boston's "Earnest": Revisiting Victoria's Secret

The Cast of "Being Earnest"
(photo: Nile Scott Studios)

Epigramatically speaking, Becoming Earnest, the season opener for Greater Boston Stage Company, is a Wilde romp, that is, it's based on Oscar Wilde's most popular play, the 1895 work The Importance of Being Earnest. Who anticipated that it would be turned into a new musical? And set in London in 1965? Intentionally Wildean comic quotations abound, presented very much tongue in cheek, which must make it awfully difficult to sing. In any case, it's actually not the first time the play was reworked as a musical comedy; it was also performed as an opera in 1961 by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco presented a couple of seasons ago in Boston by Odyssey Opera. In this iteration, Wilde's wise and witty words prove once more both their truths and their timelessness.

Kerry A. Dowling, Dave Heard & Will McGarrahan in "Being Earnest"
(photo: Nile Scott Studios)

The plot follows that of the original play. John/Jack Worthing (Dave Heard) visits his best friend Algernon Moncrieff (Michael Jennings Mahoney), who knows him as Earnest in the country, with the intention of proposing to Algernon's cousin Gwendolen Fairfax (Sara Coombs). Algernon discovers a cigarette case inscribed “to Uncle Jack from little Cecily”; he learns that Jack is living a double life in the city and that the lady in question is Jack's ward, Cecily Cardew (Ephie Aardema), with whom Algernon falls in love. Gwendolen and her mother Lady Bracknell (Beth Gotha) arrive. Lady B. is horrified to discover that Jack was found as a baby left in a handbag at Victoria Station. Meanwhile, Algernon seeks out Reverend Chasuble (Will McGarrahan, who also plays characters named Lane and Merriman, butlers in the original), to be baptized as “Earnest”, since his beloved insists she will only marry someone with that name. All turns on the secret revolving around that handbag, revealed by Cecily's tutor Miss Prism (Kerry A. Dowling), who lets the cat out of the bag, so to speak. And all ends relatively well as Jack declares he has discovered the “vital importance of being Earnest”.

Fortunately, the show's creative team has respected the original text by Wilde; the Book is attributed to Lyricist Paul Gordon, but the true authorship belongs to Wilde. Having been reduced from three acts to two, with an added musical score (by Gordon and Jay Gruska), it's most effective when utilizing Wilde's very words, which it consistently does. The text may have been edited down with a slight change in tone, but the verbal wit remains. The star of the creative team is fittingly Wilde himself. Or he's one of the stars, the other being the Director and Choreographer Ilyse Robbins, who's never been better (and that's saying quite a lot); the entire cast of seven expertly capture the era's fluid movements. The period Music Direction was by Steve Bass, with clever Scenic Design (including some ingeniously helpful pocket doors and an overhead fractured and faded Union Jack) by Nick Oberstein, crucial “mod” Carnaby Street Costume Design by Gail Astrid Buckley, apt psychedelic Lighting Design by Jeff Adelberg and fine Sound Design by John Stone.

The Cast of "Being Earnest"
(photo: Nile Scott Studios)

The score is pleasant, rather like a cross between Burt Bacharach's 1968 work Promises, Promises and the more recent (2013) A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. Some numbers end somewhat abruptly, such as the song at end of the first act, “Brothers” (Algernon and John) and the “Bad Behavior” finale to the show. It consists of a dozen original songs with no fewer than ten (thus too many) reprises, many of which serve to illustrate the lack of much variety in the composing of the score. The lyrics are more memorable, with allusions within the songs such as to the musical Man of No Importance which featured Wilde. The mix of the original text and the era of Carnaby Street's excesses too often come across as schizoid. That said, songs like “I Wish You Were Old” and visual references such as Algernon's singing of twisting while doing the twist, fit right in. It's not an easy task to pull off.

Fortunately this cast is up to that task. Mahoney is a master of movement, as is Heard, and they make a superb vaudevillian team. Aardema and Coombs are their perfect foils, and Gotha makes a memorable Lady Bracknell when pontificating about “style vs. sincerity”, or referring to Earnest as a “parcel”. It must be said that she's not the typical rendering of the pompous battleship that is Bracknell who commands a room merely by entering it, but one soon forgets this when she delivers those caustic barbs. And one can't overlook the welcome embarrassment of riches in the casting of two local favorites, Dowling and McGarrahan in supporting roles. Individually and collectively, it's a team cast in theatrical heaven.

As Algernon puts it about people in general, “some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go”. The former could equally be said overall of this show, a fresh and pleasantly enjoyable bon-bon.