“Living on Love” isn’t that lovable. But it’s sure lively.
The play, having its Connecticut premiere at Waterbury’s Seven Angels Theatre, is written by the prolific Joe DiPietro and based on “Peccadillo,” a 1987 comedy by Garson Kanin, who wrote the comedy staple “Born Yesterday” and whose novel “Smash” was credited as the basis for the TV series of the same name.
“Living on Love” had its world premiere in summer 2014 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a couple of months after a rather different romantic play by DiPietro, the presidential melodrama “The Second Mrs. Wilson,” had its premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. “Living on Love” had a short Broadway run earlier this year, starring an actual opera star, Renee Fleming, as the show’s diva, Raquel DeAngelis.
At Seven Angels Theatre, director James Glossman and a six-person cast headed by Stephanie Zimbalist as Raquel and Steve Vinovich as the singer’s pompous, equally famous orchestral-conductor husband Vito, have absolute confidence in the comic potential of the script. The show, set in 1957 but reminiscent of comedies from the 1930s, is staged almost as if it’s an opera itself, with grand entrances, overemotional exchanges and elaborate costumes. But many of these presumably surefire routines — grandiloquent outpourings of jealousy, oneupmanship, love and pride — fall flat, simply not getting the emphatic audience response they need to justify the zany pace set by the performers.
There’s a scene in which the vivacious Raquel pushes Robert, the unconfident young man she’s hired to write her memoirs, into an impromptu re-creation of one of her triumphant stage performances. She rips off the writer’s shirt as the action gets progressively louder and sillier. Yet the scene fails to build any oomph of its own. A major set piece in the second act, requiring two dining tables and a Cleopatra costume for Zimbalist can’t build any comic momentum either, despite a lot of standing up, sitting down, suspenseful speeches and screwball subplots.
Seeing the buttoned-down, disapproving heroine of the romantic TV detective show “Remington Steele” as a high-strung opera singer is certainly good for a chuckle. Zimbalist, who held her own against the imposingly upbeat Tommy Tune in the first national tour of “My One and Only,” and whose hefty stage resume includes Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, Tennessee Williams, George S. Kaufman and Stephen Sondheim, even enlivens her indomitable diva character with some elegant coloratura singing. Zimbalist is working on a higher level than Vinovich, who plays Vito as a limited-range assemblage of mispronunciations, comic Italian accents and rascally improprieties.
As the hapless ghostwriter Robert, the wiry, bespectacled Alex Glossman serves as both the play’s straight man and its “juvenile” (the young romantic lead slot in old musicals). His female counterpart is Iris Peabody, played with jittery delicacy by Ali Breneman; Iris serves as a romantic interest for Robert, eye candy for the insatiable Vito and competition for the mercurial Raquel, who declares that she has sung Medea so many times she can easily relate to the feeling of “a woman scorned.” Amid all the screaming and preening of the DeAngelises, it’s the quiet scenes between Robert and Iris that provide the purest laughs in “Living on Love.”
James Glossman’s staging is snappy, the dialogue is breezy and the whole show well-suited to the old-world summer-stock ambience of Seven Angels Theatre. But the spectacle of insecure middle-age megalomaniacs ruining the lives of insecure young romantics spins out as quickly as all the vinyl LPs that get spun and scratched on the old turntable at the back of scenic designer Daniel Husvar’s tackily lavish penthouse apartment setting.
“Living on Love” wants to hearken back to a simple era of straightforward, fun-loving and fanciful comedy. But its situations are complicated by old-world views of marriage, adultery, professional vanity and the treatment of employees. (Besides the put-upon young ghostwriters, there’s a duo of butlers played with stereophonic haughty intensity by R. Bruce Connelly and Michael Irvin Pollard.) The sexist, classist jokes are troublesome. At best, they’re outdated and cliched. At worst, they’re outright offensive.
Joe DiPietro wants this play to be more “A Night at the Opera” than “Mozart in the Jungle,” using the supposedly stuffy and insular world of opera as an easy playground for grand selfish emotions and petty elitist disputes, rather than exploring that world with the empathetic pop-ground panache DiPietro brought to his evocative books for the musicals “Memphis” (also set in the 1950s) and “Nice Work If You Can Get It” (set in the nouveau-riche world of Prohibition bootlegging). This is a pity, since that aforementioned overdone, going-nowhere scene with the shirtless scribe and the overbearing diva contains a few truly compelling lines about passion, performance and operatic tricks of the trade. That monologue hints at what “Living on Love” could have been — grand, graceful, melodic, dramatic and honestly amusing.
“LIVING ON LOVE” is at the Seven Angels Theatre, 1 Plank Road, Waterbury, through Dec. 6, as part of the theater’s 25th anniversary season. The show runs two hours with a 15-minute intermission. Performances are Thursdays (except Thanksgiving Day) and Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m., with added matinees at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 19, and Tuesday, Nov. 24. For tickets: sevenangelstheatre.org, 203-757-4676.
