|
|
|
Canaries Sometimes Sing
by Frederick Lonsdale
SECRETS & LIES
DIRECTED BY STUART ROSS
September 16-19, 2011
|
| OVERVIEW |
|
This sparkling comedy by English dramatist, Fredrick Lonsdale, gives a bird's eye view of married life and the fine line between the comforts of the cage versus its confines. Although Lonsdale may not have all the answers, this jovial and effervescent play will get you thinking about everyone's happily ever after in a whole new way. |
| CAST/CREW |
MARK ALHADEFF+
Geoffrey Lyme
RON McCLARY+
Ernest Melton
KELLLY McANDREW
Elma Melton
EILEEN ARNOLD
Stage Manager
AMIR KHOSROWPOUR+
Music by
+ TACT Company Member |
| DRAMATURGY |
Kicking off our Salon Series this year, TACT is proud to present Frederick Lonsdale's 1929 comedy, Canaries Sometimes Sing, a 1920s parlor play replete with overheard confessions, drawing room love affairs, and backroom tomfoolery. In short, the play is packed with "Secrets and Lies," our theme this season. Written in 1929 and a London smash hit, Canaries was received as most all of Lonsdale's prior plays had been to date: with great enthusiasm. After viewing a first preview, famously fickle critic Hannen Swaffer, of the British Daily Express, proclaimed of Lonsdale: "He has written around four characters a sparkling comedy which has at least twenty witty remarks and a plot the next move in which you could never guess two minutes before. Canaries Sometimes Sing is one long surprise ... will be a great success unless I am more wrong that usual." Indeed, by all accounts, Lonsdale was one of the most successful playwrights in the English-speaking world of the 1920s and 30s, and he retained this fame and notoriety until his death in 1954.
The playwright himself is a fascinating character; he was a man of many secrets and lies of a kind, or at the very least tall tales and fibs. Frederick Lonsdale (Freddy to nearly everyone he met) was a man of manifold eccentricities and mysterious beginnings. Born in 1881 as Lionel Frederick Leonard and raised on the humble Isle of Jersey, Freddy had little-to-no education, stubbornly refusing to take advantage even of the meager schooling to which he was entitled. Despite his overall lack of grammatical knowledge, Freddy wrote his way into fame, where he remained for the duration of his life.
His plays focus on manners and wit, particularly taking aim at the conventions of marriage and social standing, as with Canaries. In his time he was often likened and compared to Congreve and Sheridan, the great Restoration and 18th century English playwrights that mastered the parlor play before him. His first play, The Early Worm, produced in 1908, played to an audience that included King Edward VIII. After the viewing, Lonsdale found himself summoned to court and admonished by Edward himself that the play was "bad," though the king was quite sure of Freddy's talent, and he assured the young playwright that he would write a good play if he took "a little more trouble." So began the remarkable career of the uneducated, unpredictable yet incessantly charming man.
Many tales surrounded Freddy's eccentric and eclectic personality, regarding both his flamboyant career and his bizarre and extraordinary upbringing. Even the choosing of his professional name, Frederick Lonsdale, has multiple renditions. The most popular of which is that as a young man in London, while strolling with a friend and discussing how to avoid his rampant debts, Freddy decided that a name change would be most wise and he would take on the surname of whatever street he next meandering down, which happened to be Lonsdale Road.
Similarly, his early release from the army has multiple variations, each more or less probable, though the one most often told by Freddy himself eventually asserted itself as fact. Only after his death did his daughter cum biographer discover a new, more detailed account of Freddy's miraculous release. It was told that despite his initial excitement at his seeming means of escape from Jersey, Lonsdale soon discovered himself to be entirely unfit for combat or even training (chronicled in copious miserable letters to his mother), and yet he lacked the money to buy his way back out of the force. He did, however, find enjoyment in the army writing a sketch that was performed at a regimental entertainment one evening. He found, much to his delight, that his particularly hilarious and nasty piece about the regiment's General had the company "rolling in the aisles." Though he was reprimanded for it, a few days later the General's wife came to Freddy to thank him for the endless amusement he'd brought to her with his little piece. Upon hearing of Freddy's discomfort with his situation, she immediately went to work getting his release, requesting an army doctor friend of hers to submit a letter claiming Freddy had a faulty heart, assuring a discharge. Lonsdale and the General's wife remained good friends, so the story goes, for many years to follow.
Certainly a man of unpredictable but unflinching principles, he always took great pains to assure that his will was the only way. This stalwart stubbornness - Freddy's way or the highway - manifested itself through his bizarre and fascinating behavior, from hypochondria to valiant acts of faithfulness. The epitome of an anxious and fickle traveler, he'd often leave England to arrive in New York in time for a first rehearsal or read-through or casting. To his poor producer's great chagrin, however, Lonsdale more than once ended up missing-in-action shortly thereafter, having made a last minute decision to abandon ship before clearing British waters and never arriving on Yankee shores.
Convinced all his life that he was suffering from some form of cancer, his most dramatic flourishes of sickness were brought about out of sheer boredom, seemingly emerging so as to fill the time until the next bit of excitement came along. This hypochondria permeated into Lonsdale's very psyche, rendering him psychosomatically allergic to reviews and success. Always suspicious of his own triumphs, he seldom believed in the excitement others had about his shows, exhibiting a reluctance to share in the celebration.
Not merely self-interested, though, Lonsdale's pig-headed faithfulness was most admirably shown through his utmost loyalty to his friends. During the First World War, for example, his good friend George Bernard Shaw was asked to leave the Dramatists Guild after making his anti-war sentiments known. Incensed, Freddy left the Guild as well, declaring, "I'm certainly not good enough to belong to any organization of dramatists which won't have Shaw as a member."
Despite the many half-truths, false accounts, and fictions that exist about Lonsdale, the hard fact that truly emerges through these anecdotes, clippings and his lovingly written biography (by his "favorite daughter," Frances Donaldson), is that he was an insatiable personality and charismatic charmer that drew people to him. His vividly blue, expectant and observing eyes were surely a draw as well.
Eventually, as with so many playwrights, when Lonsdale’s material stayed unchanged and the political climate became more and more turbulent through the 1930s and 40s, critics began to point out that Freddy's work had become outmoded and irrelevant. Lonsdale simply shrugged off most commentary of this sort with the response, "I don't want to go to the theatre to argue. I'd rather do that at the supper table; you can get all the problems you want by listening to Hitler and Mussolini these days."
All told, Lonsdale wrote twenty-four plays and musicals between the years 1908 and 1950, with only a handful running fewer than 100 performances. Among his most famous were On Approval, Aren't We All, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, and Spring Cleaning. Canaries Sometimes Sing, his 20th premiere, debuted at the London Globe Theatre on October 21, 1929 and ran for 144 performances. On October 20th of the following year, Canaries opened at The Fulton Theatre (now the Helen Hayes) in New York City with a cast that included the British-born Robert Loraine, Mary Merrall, actor/director Athole Stewart, and French-born Yvonne Arnaud, all well known stage and screen actors of the day.
Though Lonsdale has now drifted onto the isle of forgotten playwrights, during his lifetime those who knew him and knew of him were certain of his continued celebrity. His indelible mark on Western culture in the first half of the 20th century may have faded with time, but his treasure trove of proven material remains as sharp as ever, ripe for a 21st century airing.
TACT is thrilled to have unearthed Lonsdale's neglected Canaries Sometimes Sing. And we welcome it back after its eighty-one year absence from New York City, still sonorant with sumptuous scandal and social commentary.
|
|
