Broadway review by Adam Feldman
The ancient Greeks, in the earliest extant plays in the Western canon, frequently drew on mythology in their treatment of human conflicts. So does the modern British playwright Jez Butterworth. In Jerusalem (2009), he took on primal magic embedded in Englishness identity; The Ferryman (2017) was haunted by elements of Irish folklore. And although his captivating and poignant new drama, The Hills of California, takes place in the brackish British seaside town of Blackpool, it is centrally concerned with another regional mythos: the American Dream.
To depict the tangled Webb family, the play toggles between two decades. Much of it takes place in 1976, when three adult sisters reunite at the Sea View, a guest house owned by the family; their mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer on an upper floor, and a fourth sister—the eldest, Joan, who moved to the U.S. some 20 years earlier—hasn’t shown up. But Butterworth shifts periods, periodically, to show us the same characters in 1955, when Veronica (played by a magnetically steely Laura Donnelly) is trying her best to mold them into child stars in a singing sister act.
Veronica’s showbiz model is the Andrews Sisters; the girls not only perform that trio’s close-harmony hits (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right”) but also reenact their publicity interviews at the kitchen table. The goal is to reach the American paradise extolled in another of the numbers Veronica chooses: a throwaway 1948 B-side, recorded by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers, called “The Hills of California.” There’s gold in them thar hills, or at least gold records! What she doesn’t get—when asked if she’s heard of Elvis Presley, she replies, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what that is”—is that popular culture is already moving on to rock and roll. She’s prepping her kids for a future that is yesterday already.
The Hills of California | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Meanwhile, back in their actual future, the sisters are hardly living the dream. Gloria Kim (Leanne Best), who radiates resentment and fury, seems perpetually at the end of the tether that binds her to a husband and two children she treats with contempt. Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond), ever the peacemaking middle child, has the loveliest voice of the sisters, but not the drive to back it up; she’s listless and prone to panic attacks. Jill (Helena Wilson), the youngest, is a lonely spinster who takes care of the tippling, demented Veronica; the other sisters having fled, she’s been left holding the old bag. (When Jill and Ruby sing a duet of Rodgers and Hart’s “It Never Entered My Mind,” Jill winds up with the line about “saying a maiden’s prayer.”)
The actors who play the sisters all originated their roles in London earlier this year, as did the four girls (Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally, Lara McDonnell and Nicola Turner) who play the younger Webbs. That is surely one reason why director Sam Mendes’s production seems so fluid and cohesive on Broadway. That’s no small feat: Having this many main female characters to track—the men, by design, are largely ineffectual—creates shifting fields of interest; it would have been easy to lose focus, but Mendes never does. This is wide-scoped and complicated storytelling, and he and designer Rob Howell give it a staging to match: Above the Sea View’s shabby sitting room (with its tiki bar, broken jukebox and Lucky Lady slot machine) rise gorgeous flights of dark wooden stairs, double-crossing their way to the heavens.
The Hills of California | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
The stronger Blackpool accents take getting used to, but their effect is ultimately salutary: They make you lean in and listen extra hard, and Butterworth’s writing rewards the effort. The Hills of California is often very funny, but it has a core of deep regret that gets revealed as layers of family secrets are peeled away. It is serendipitous that The Hills of California is sharing the fall season with a revival of Gypsy, because the two shows have a great deal in common: Like that musical’s Mama Rose, Veronica has a determination to make her children famous that becomes, at some points, monstrous.
While the play is an ensemble effort, it is also an extraordinary showcase for Donnelly. The present here is haunted by the past, and the two collide powerfully in the wreckage and reckoning of the play’s third act. (Butterworth has rewritten it for the better from the version that played in London.) Donnelly returns in this final stretch, strikingly and effectively, to play a wholly different character. But the moment in her performance that will stay with me the longest comes a little earlier, at the end of the second act, when Veronica stares out at the audience, failed by her aplomb, listening in terror for a silence she dreads. In her eyes we see the cost of her ambition: As ancient in its way as any, this is a story of human sacrifice.
The Hills of California. Broadhurst Theatre (Broadway). By Jez Butterworth. Directed by Sam Mendes. With Laura Donnelly, Leanne Best, Ophelia Lovibond, Helena Wilson, Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally, Lara McDonnell, Nicola Turner. Running time: 2hrs 45mins. One intermission.
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The Hills of California | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
