Stage: Oh, Coward!

Writers’ Theatre at Books on Vernon

Chicago

(847) 242-6000

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Performances of Noël Coward’s work tend to get bogged down in all the “puns, verbal ripostes, and campy, veddy English comedy,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Consider this a welcome exception. Director Jim Corti has stripped Roderick Cook’s 1972 revue of Coward’s songs of its “twee narration,” and replaced a few of the selections. What remains is an “exquisite” piece of theater infused with “ambiguity, texture, and melancholy”—a fitting homage to the troubled yet effervescent playwright and composer. Performers John Sanders, Rob Lindley, and Kate Fry form a “glamorous, dangerous, sexually complex threesome.” Together, they sashay through numbers about forbidden love (“Mad About the Boy”), loneliness (“World Weary”), and the British Empire’s upper crust (“Mad Dogs and Englishmen”).

Glittering, witty, and refined, Oh, Coward! feels like a “passport to another era,” said Dennis Polkow in Newcity Chicago. Even the venue—a suburban bookstore that has somehow been transformed into a 50-seat “art deco nightclub of the 1930s”—evokes the feeling of time travel. It also doesn’t hurt that music director Doug Peck “greets you in tails” before he settles onto the piano bench. Sanders and Lindley are suitably elegant crooners, though it sometimes seems as if they’re competing, “with varying degrees of success,” to see who can best impersonate a droll Englishman. Fry shines the brightest of the three leads; a “perfect foil” for the men, she “breaks our heart with her poignancy.” For those who’ve forgotten “what an original voice” Coward was, Oh, Coward! is an excellent reminder.