Educating Rita
Colony Theatre
Los Angeles
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“Those familiar with the film version of Educating Rita may not be aware that Willy Russell’s Oscar-nominated screenplay began as a two-person play,” said F. Kathleen Foley in the Los Angeles Times. The first American production of Russell’s revised stage version gets a deft interpretation at the hands of director Cameron Watson, who expertly handles the tempestuous relationship between the brash, knowledge-hungry hairdresser Rita, and her tutor, the drunken professor and poet-manqué Frank. The production stumbles a bit, muddling the chronology—references to “fusion” cuisine sit awkwardly alongside such props as a rotary phone. But audiences will be rewarded for overlooking such minor flaws. “Rita remains a durably funny, brisk examination of British class divisions and commonalities.”
This production has far deeper problems than a few anachronisms, said Bob Verini in Variety. Watson stages the family arguments at the play’s core with “all the finesse of Rock’em Sock’em Robots.” In the definitive 1983 film version, Michael Caine and Julie Walters played their respective parts perfectly, like “a duet for cello and flute.” Here Bjorn Johnson and Rebecca Mozo bring to their performances all the deftness and subtlety of “dueling tubas in an oompah band.” Mozo’s Rita spends most of the play’s two and a half hours attacking her mentor with “unrelieved sarcasm at top volume.” Johnson returns her unmodulated volleys “sneer for sneer, bellow for bellow.” As a result, Russell’s “venerable intellectual comedy” comes off as nothing more than a shouting match.
