Berkshires arts reviews

July 5 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Kay Walbye & Jason Butler Harner & Amanda Leigh Cobb in The Front Page at Williamstown; photo by Joan Marcus

Williamstown Theatre Festival opened its season on the Main Stage with a smashing, fast-paced, and meticulously mounted and costumed production of Hecht and Macarthur’s 1928 farce masterpiece, The Front Page.

Written almost a century ago and an instant smash hit,the play has over the years survived as a classic (despite numerous revivals in film and on TV in which actors ranging from Adoph Menjou to Burt Reynolds starred, and in which at times one of the two lead characters was switched to a female role for Rosalind Russell or Kathleen Turner).

What we get in the Williamstown current production, is the classic restored to its pristine reality, the gritty dingy reality of the Press Room in the Chicago Criminal Court Building where reporters from all the daily papers are tediously awaiting the biggest event of the day, the 7AM hanging of Earl Williams, convicted of killing a black policeman.

Otherwise the news is nil. They play poker, send out for sandwiches, josh the cleaning woman, from time to time look out the windows where the scaffold for the hanging is being erected, and grippe about wishing the event could be earlier so they could make the morning edition on a day that seems devoid of news.

The opening act is thus low key, although already awash with the humor that will, as the play progresses, explode into one of the fastest paced farces on record.

Because, almost sneakily, the plot begins. Hildy Johnson, reporter for The Examiner comes rushing in announcing his immediate departure, with future bride and her mother, for New York City. This leads so immediate conflict with his editor, Walter Burns, who knows Hildy is the best reporter on his staff and has no intention of letting him go.

And then, all set to defy his boss and set off with the woman he loves, Hildy is confronted not only with the news that Earl Williams has escaped, (news which quickly empties the pressroom of all but Hildy, still intent on his packing) but with Earl Williams climbing into the press room through one of the windows. Suddenly the ace reporter is torn between escaping to a future in Manhattan and the chance of a lifetime of writing the biggest story of his career.

The machinations, manipulations, the deceit, (and the compassion) that move along this plot as carried on by the large cast (of around thirty, mostly male actors) are a joy to experience and best left untold. As presented, not only does the tension rise steadily in each act, but so does the physical activity. Director Ron Daniels has timing down to a science.

Jason Butler Harner as Hildy is dynamic, appealing and wildly competent. Richard Kind as his managing editor, Walter Burns, is despotic, manipulative and compelling. His words are the last ones we hear in the play. During the first act he is vividly (and ingeniously) present only on the phone. He is even more vociferously present when in the subsequent acts he explodes into the Press Room and its subterfuges.

These two are the “stars” of any production or version of this play. And they deserve the hearty applause they get in this successful revival of the long ago Broadway hit.

They are more than ably supported by Amanda Leigh Cobb as Peggy Grant, the loving and bewildered bride-to-be, and her mother (Kay Walbye). Both ladies clad in their 1920’s travel garments are long-sufferingly involved in a whirl wind of activity in which they want no part beyond boarding the train and escaping.

As for poor Earl Williams, unfairly involved in a political plot of Chicago’s corrupt mayor and the local sheriff, we see little of him, (for plot reasons so delicious they must not be disclosed) but Bill Cwikowski plays him to perfection when he is in evidence, and his betrayal gives the playwrights (and this production) a chance, despite the hysterical farce, to bring in a touch of realism concerning the corruption of the time and place in which the play is set.

The press room setting is magnificent. Most impressive are the numerous telephones, the old-fashioned upright ones with ear-phone on a long cord. The ingenious ways in which the press room gang manage to hold both phone and receiver in one hand while writing on a note-pad with the other hand, is worth a trip to Williamstown. In such minute details this play shines, and all the characters in it shine as well.

The Front Page was an instant classic. It is restored to that instant classic status by the current production in Williamstown.

WTF info: get directions to Williamstown Theatre Festival.

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