'The Hills of California,' alive with the sound of music (original) (raw)

NEW YORK, NY .- Two sounds greet you at the start of “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s relentlessly entertaining new play: the crashing of waves on the beaches of Blackpool and the tinkling of a tinny piano being tuned.

Both are plot points: The story concerns a musical family operating a rundown resort on the west coast of England. “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “When I Fall in Love” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” are among the marvelous oldies you’ll hear sung during the course of the action.

But the crashing and tuning are thematic points, too. Though frequently funny and, even at nearly three hours, swift, “The Hills of California,” which opened Sunday at the Broadhurst Theater, drops you deep into the devastations of time and lifts you gently into the consolations of song.

It does so within a familiar stage format — familiar in life, alas, as well: the dying-parent drama. In 1976, the four Webb sisters reunite at the Seaview Luxury Guesthouse (which is neither luxurious nor within sight of the sea) as their mother, Veronica, who ran the place for decades, under several desperate versions of the name, expires upstairs.

Jillian, the youngest, has failed to thrive; she’s a 32-year-old virgin who lives at home, chatters nervously and secretly smokes. The others have run as far from Blackpool as they could: Ruby and Gloria into unhappy marriages hours away; Joan, the oldest, toward a dream of fame in California. Whether she has achieved that dream is an open question; she has not been back home since she left at 15, and only Jillian believes she will return even now.

All this is efficiently established in the play’s opening scene, which is so sharply and subtly directed by Sam Mendes, and so vividly performed by the cast, you hardly notice all the information you’re being fed: tics, conflicts, personalities, pecking order. Then, just as you’ve finally attached everyone’s names to their faces, Butterworth rewinds to 1955, when the sisters, played by a new set of actors, are teenagers and Veronica is a terror.

Not without cause. Widowed young, under circumstances so doubtful that no one knows for sure what happened, Veronica (Laura Donnelly) is determined that her daughters should avoid the miserable existence of disempowered womanhood that has left her own dreams dashed. In the kitchen of the already seedy guesthouse, where customers called Mr. and Mrs. probably aren’t, she drills her brood in the stylized gestures and close-harmony vocals of swing-era girl groups, as if their happiness, or at least hers, depended on it.

“What is a song?” she asks catechistically. “Somewhere you can live. And in that place, there are no walls. No boundaries. No locks. No keys.”

Veronica’s point of reference is the Andrews Sisters — with “one spare.” Yours may be “Gypsy,” likewise the story of a mother training her daughters for careers in a showbiz genre already half dead. (The Andrews Sisters broke up in early 1950s.) Forced to face that reality, Veronica, like Rose in “Gypsy,” is decisively unsentimental and perhaps even monstrous. At whatever cost to everyone else, she narrows her ambition to Joan (Lara McDonnell), who is willing to do whatever it takes.

What it takes, as we see when an American agent (David Wilson Barnes) comes to audition the sisters in a brilliantly conceived and executed scene, makes Rose seem like a nun.

One of the thrills of Butterworth’s dramatic construction is the way it forces the play’s past into conversation with its present. And Mendes, an expert at keeping large canvases intimate, gives equal weight to the details and the overview. (So does the wonderfully natural sound design by Nick Powell.) As the periods magically interpenetrate in Rob Howell’s rotating behemoth of a set, lit by Natasha Chivers as if time were a scrim, we see how the hasty choices of the past have played out momentously over the years.

More than the piano has come untuned. The girls, now women, are sour too, introduced in order of awfulness, from the merely silly Jillian (Helena Wilson) to the warm but snappish Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) to the horrifically and hilariously furious Gloria (Leanne Best) — a character whose metastasized disappointment is exactly what Veronica, hoping to spare her, taught her.

Even so, Gloria is but a patch on the original, who is so utterly magnetizing that she continues to dominate her daughters’ thoughts from her deathbed. Donnelly, for whom Butterworth, her partner, wrote the role, makes of her a beautiful dragon, sharp and forbidding, strict with the girls and more so with the tenants. And though we see the circumstances that require that harshness — a woman’s body was a free-for-all for handsy men, and also, when necessary, a bargaining chip — Donnelly does not waste even one gesture on likability. She’s as narrowly tailored as her pencil skirts.

And then she’s the opposite. In Act 3, it is no spoiler to say, she is almost unrecognizable as she switches to playing the adult Joan, overripe and dissolute. Relishing the opportunity to create a startling contrast, Donnelly ditches the beautiful dragon and becomes what Ruby calls a “sexy lizard.” Costumed (by Howell) as a Laurel Canyon refugee, her Joan is a blur of skittery emotion, as if disappointment and drugs have eaten away the outlines that Veronica went to such lengths to maintain.

To be honest, the outlines of the third act itself are blurry, even though Butterworth rewrote it significantly after the play’s run in London this year. The Webb sisters, so dramatically differentiated in the earlier scenes, begin to blend in the final one, as acrimony eventually becomes harmony. The husbands of Ruby and Gloria, having been briefly introduced earlier, are quickly dismissed as two sides of a faceless coin. And after so much beautiful setup, it becomes hard to pin down the payoff.

No matter. This is not the kind of play that brandishes a singular sharp point; it is the kind that swaddles you in innumerable impressions. Like Butterworth’s previous Broadway outings — the mythopoetic “Jerusalem” in 2011, the brawny Hugh Jackman vehicle “The River” in 2014 and especially the Irish fable “The Ferryman” in 2018 — “The Hills of California” is a yarn, not a lesson; a tale, not a tract. It resists interpretation, possibly as a way of resisting criticism, which, despite its flaws, it clearly does with great success.

In that, it is much like one of Veronica’s songs: A place to live. No boundaries. No locks. No keys.

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‘The Hills of California’Through Dec. 8 at Broadhurst Theater, Manhattan; thehillsofcalifornia.com. Running Time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.