High Society review – a fizzing cocktail of comedy, Cole Porter and emotion
In the game of life, what matters most? According to Dinah (the only child in this story, played with Puckish glee by Katlo), “being in love”. Arthur Kopit’s 1998 stage version of the 1956 film musical High Society (starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter) keeps the sparkling lightness of the film but adds depth to the characters, opening up their inner lives by introducing additional Porter numbers imported from other musicals (with extra lyrics from Susan Birkenhead).
Director Joseph Pitcher and his creative team (including Jaye Elster, choreographer; Nic Farman and Hector Murray, lights; Chris Whybrow, sound) cleverly play off the contrasts between brittle facades of social pretence and the messy realities of the characters’ inner lives through a fluid staging that combines light, sound and movement playfully and feelingly (for instance, by using tonal differences in lighting to isolate a character within a scene, turning their musical number into an internal monologue contrasting with the action continuing around them).
The setting is New York state’s Oyster Bay, at the home of the wealthy and privileged Lord family (backdrop of yachts on blue water, a round moon filling a night sky, in Jason Denvir’s crisp, evocative setting). Tomorrow, Dinah’s big sister, Tracy Lord (Victoria Serra), will marry the upright, uptight, ambitious, successful working man George (Will Richardson). Tracy’s first husband, fellow socialite, Dexter (Matt Blaker), has turned up, uninvited, to the pre-nuptial party (here, it was his drinking that destroyed their marriage; he is now teetotal). Also present, under false pretences, are two undercover reporters from Spy magazine – Mike (Matthew Jeans) and Liz (Laura Tyrer) – looking for a salacious story about Tracy’s father (Russell Wilcox) and the showgirl for whom his is supposed to have left her mother (Heather Jackson).
The multilayered series of confusions and resolutions that follow are conveyed with vim by the uniformly excellent 15-strong cast and four-strong band, under Tom Noyes’s direction: comedy and emotion in effervescent combination.
