Last week, my wife and I did another Broadway blitz, flying to New York to see four new plays. This week, I offer reviews of them for you. I began yesterday with “Yellow Face” (read it here). Now, here’s the second…
“The Hills Of California” is the new play by Jez Butterworth, who won a Tony in 2017 for “The Ferryman,” and has written screenplays for the James Bond movie “Spectre,” the James Brown biopic “Get On Up,” and the political drama “Fair Game,” among others.
This play is about the Webb sisters, who reconvene in 1976 at the home they grew up in — the Seaview Luxury Guesthouse in the beachside town of Blackpool, England — because their mother, Veronica, is dying. She had run the place for decades after her husband died and managed to keep it going, despite the fact it wasn’t near the sea, had no decent view, and its best days were well in the past.
The youngest Webb, Jillian, stayed to help her mother while her older sisters moved hours away and rarely returned. Early on, we meet two of them, Ruby and Gloria, who are unhappily married and have kids. However, the oldest, Joan, hasn’t been heard from since moving to California at age 15 to try to make it in the music business, so it’s not clear whether she’ll be joining her siblings in their maternal death watch.
As the plot unwinds, we learn that, as kids, the four sisters were trained by Veronica to be a singing group like her favorite act, the Andrews Sisters (the most popular female vocal group of the first half of the twentieth century, with more than eighty million records sold). We see evidence of her efforts when the stage — which includes the most elaborate wooden staircase I’ve ever seen in a theater or anywhere else — revolves to show us four different actresses playing the sisters in 1955 as teenagers. Under Veronica’s tutelage, they not only remember every detail she’s taught them about the Andrews’ tact, but sing several songs they were famous for (including “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Dream A Little Dream Of Me”) in perfect harmony.
It is evident from the way the sisters talk about her that Veronica was a tough taskmaster, but she had a good reason. She was determined to launch her daughters into a show business career that would take them away from the drab, seedy surroundings they grew up in. But it’s clear there was more to their history, which we don’t discover until a revelation in the second act of a family secret which explains much of the bitterness — and why no one’s heard from Joan for so long.
“The Hills Of California” is not a happy story of a loving family, but I was completely invested in the Webb women from beginning to end. Though not a musical, the scenes with the girls singing and dancing were a lot of fun, and the entire cast hit just the right tone — as they should, since almost all of them were imported from the production earlier this year in the West End in London. Rob Howell deserves special mention for the design of the set with its mammoth staircase, which somehow manages not to overwhelm the tragic tale being told, for which director Sam Mendes deserves credit, too.
The only complaint my wife and I had was how difficult it was to hear some of the lines through the working class British accents. If we’d been watching this at home on our living room TV, we definitely would have needed the subtitles, but once my dumb American ears got used to it, I was able to keep up.
A final note: after writing everything above, I read reviews of this play by theater critics at two media outlets I considered reputable. I wanted to see if I had forgotten something, and was shocked to see that both of their pieces gave away several major plot points. I consider such spoilers a disservice to readers (especially without a warning), which is why I don’t include them in my reviews.
Tomorrow: my review of Delia Ephron’s “Left On Tenth.”