One Man, Two Guvnors

Play (2011)
by Richard Bean

With Dale Place (Charlie “The Duck” Clench), Tiffany Chen (Pauline Clench), Larry Coen (Harry Dangle), Alejandro Simoes (Alan), Aimee Doherty (Dolly), Davron S. Monroe (Lloyd Boateng), Neil A. Casey (Francis), McCaela Donovan (Rachel Crabbe), Dan Whelton (Stanley Stubbers), Harry McEnerny V (Gareth), John Davin (Alfie), Chuong Pham (Barman), James Blaszko (Policeman)

Written as a takeoff on Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, this contemporary British farce is set in the early 1960s. Though featuring some notable design elements of that era – one of the male characters has long hair, for instance – there is not too much about the new time setting that adds to the farce itself. The British touch does add a new flavor to the Goldoni piece, giving a spin that depends on the particularities of British class consciousness.

All in all, the show is jolly good fun. The cast features some superb Boston musical actors – notably, Aimee Doherty (who lit up the Lyric’s production of On The Town last spring) and McCaela Donovan (featured in all sorts of shows around town in the past few years, including a great turn as Constanze in the New Repertory Theatre’s production of Amadeus, also last spring), and a bunch of others, all capable.

The servant (Truffaldino in Goldoni’s play) is here called Francis and played with excellent ad libbing capacity by Neil A. Casey. His stock lines work pretty well, but in what are mostly impromptu interactions with the audience, Casey is quick, spontaneous and hilarious. He has numerous of these and the grandest one comes with a big and amusing surprise.

McCaela Donovan (Rachel Crabbe) does a great cross-dressing turn, showing up as a gamine-like male à la Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. She lowers her voice just a bit making it gravelly in a seductive way, spicing up the stage delightfully. Aimee Doherty (Dolly), the servant of the working-class Charlie “The Duck” Clench (played effectively by Dale Place), is a vivid bundle of energy.

Donovan, Doherty and Tiffany Chen (who plays an appealingly dim and funny Pauline Clench) do a couple of song and dance numbers that are beautifully sung and vividly reminiscent of the girl trios of the early 1960s.

Larry Coen (Harry Dangle) as a lawyer with a penchant for overuse of Latin, is superbly officious and eloquently verbose. Alejandro Simoes, as the long-haired Alan, plays a histrionic romantic role with great silliness. Dan Whelton (Stanley Stubbers) is an appropriately complicated second master, juggling romantic hero and potential convict with aplomb.

The entre’acte music is a little long and feels a bit out of kilter. A lot of it is American-style rhythm and blues and country style music that does not fit with the British aura of the farce. This is commedia dell’arte, so anything goes, but this felt a bit belabored and somewhat off the main tone of the evening, though the music was well done and enjoyable enough. Though putatively a musical, relatively little of the music is integrated with, or germane to, the action, which makes it feel like an addendum. When it does, as in the final number, get integrated, the music makes more contextual sense and fits in better.

– BADMan