Books, Arts & Manners: Twentieth-Century Blues

NOEL COWARD is, for most of us, epitomized by Elyot and Amanda standing on that balcony, trading languid epigrams (“How potent cheap music is”; or “I wonder whose yacht that is.” “The Duke of Westminster’s, I expect—it always is”). But one of Coward’s finest, and least known, plays is a world away from Private Lives—a big, untidy, emotional extravaganza called Cavalcade. It follows the Marryots, an upper-middle-class London family, and the Bridgeses, who start out as their servants, for thirty years, beginning just before midnight on December 31, 1899. Cavalcade has some clever lines (as when fireworks marking the turn of the century are followed by yowling from the nursery, leading Jane Marryot to remark, “How very impolite of the twentieth century to wake the children”). But the focus is on ordinary human hopes and fears and griefs, set against the broader historical canvas—Mafeking night; the death of Queen Victoria (“Five kings riding behind her”); the horror of the First World War; the febrility of the Twenties, giving way to the depression of the Thirties (“Blues, twentieth-century blues, are getting me down”).

Cavalcade would, I suspect, be economically impossible to produce on Broadway today. It has a cast of more than sixty; and while there is a lot of music in it, it couldn’t be billed as, or priced like, a musical. But what commercial theater can’t do, a determined repertory company can. The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, has brought back its 1985-86 production, with many of the same actors (notably, Fiona Reid and Andrew Gillies as the Marryots, and Wendy Thatcher and David Schurmann as the Bridgeses . One can quibble at this or that (Lisa Waines. as Fanny Bridges, doesn’t have the jazz chanteuse style for “Twentieth-Century Blues”: and one of the play’s chilling surprises is telegraphed in the program notes . but this is a play to see again and again.

About the Author

Linda Bridges

Ms. Bridges is the former editor-at-large of National Review.

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NOEL COWARD is, for most of us, epitomized by Elyot and Amanda standing on that balcony, trading languid epigrams (“How potent cheap music is”; or “I wonder whose yacht that is.” “The Duke of Westminster’s, I expect—it always is”). But one of Coward’s finest, and least known, plays is a world away from Private Lives—a big, untidy, emotional extravaganza called Cavalcade. It follows the Marryots, an upper-middle-class London family, and the Bridgeses, who start out as their servants, for thirty years, beginning just before midnight on December 31, 1899. Cavalcade has some clever lines (as when fireworks marking the turn of the century are followed by yowling from the nursery, leading Jane Marryot to remark, “How very impolite of the twentieth century to wake the children”). But the focus is on ordinary human hopes and fears and griefs, set against the broader historical canvas—Mafeking night; the death of Queen Victoria (“Five kings riding behind her”); the horror of the First World War; the febrility of the Twenties, giving way to the depression of the Thirties (“Blues, twentieth-century blues, are getting me down”).

Cavalcade would, I suspect, be economically impossible to produce on Broadway today. It has a cast of more than sixty; and while there is a lot of music in it, it couldn’t be billed as, or priced like, a musical. But what commercial theater can’t do, a determined repertory company can. The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, has brought back its 1985-86 production, with many of the same actors (notably, Fiona Reid and Andrew Gillies as the Marryots, and Wendy Thatcher and David Schurmann as the Bridgeses . One can quibble at this or that (Lisa Waines. as Fanny Bridges, doesn’t have the jazz chanteuse style for “Twentieth-Century Blues”: and one of the play’s chilling surprises is telegraphed in the program notes . but this is a play to see again and again.