‘High Society’ at the Walnut (2nd review)

The fault lies not so much with the Walnut as with the producers of this adaptation, which ran on Broadway in 1998. They took a breezy and sophisticated 1939 comedy and turned it into a crass, low-class sitcom.

The show is based on the real-life Main Line family of Hope Montgomery, a devotee of foxhunting and horse shows. Hope’s father was an investment banker; Hope herself married the grandson of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, then the world’s largest corporation. Playwright Philip Barry was a Harvard classmate of Hope’s brother, and his script was closely based on reality, although he renamed Hope as Tracy Lord.

The play is ostensibly set in 1938, when Hope was 34 and her sister Mary Binney was a 30-year-old ballet dancer and piano soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. (The playwright changed the younger sister into an adolescent.) They lived in a 45-room mansion designed by the gilded-age architect Horace Trumbauer near the border between Radnor and Villanova.

Mugging for laughs

The story relates how the super-cool heroine is defrosted on the eve of her scheduled wedding to a stuffy upper-class fop and reunited with her true love, her ex-husband. In the original play and the 1940 movie, Katharine Hepburn captured the essence of Hope while Cary Grant elegantly played her husband. When the story was musicalized in the 1956 film High Society, Grace Kelly brought cultivated reserve to the part while Bing Crosby played her suave, understated ex-husband.

In the Walnut’s reincarnation, the actors say it’s 1938, but they don’t appear to inhabit that era. Their costumes, language, and attitudes are all wrong. And they relentlessly mug for laughs instead of engaging in sophisticated wordplay.

As ex-husband Dexter, Paul Schaefer slouches and wears the sloppy clothes of a college frat brother who wouldn’t be admitted to any Main Line home in 1938. As Tracy, Megan Nicole Arnoldy wears a wedding-day red dress that reeked 21st-century knockoff instead of a chic outfit befitting a millionairess in 1938.

In the film High Society the locale was changed from the Philadelphia suburbs to Newport, Rhode Island, which allowed a romantic scene on a yacht. In this version, a small model yacht is the inadequate substitution. The adapters literally missed the boat.

Extraneous songs

Even Cole Porter’s music — the best thing about this production — was sabotaged by those 1998 meddlers. Porter didn't write enough songs for the film to fill a full-length Broadway show, always a problem when adapting a film for a stage production. Since movies rely on visuals rather than musical numbers, a stage recreation must add songs that were written for other venues. (See my review of Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn.)

Two of the extraneous numbers were inserted cleverly. Tracy made her stage entrance direct from horseback riding and sang the borrowed 1936 Porter song, “Ridin’ High.” An even earlier Porter hit — “Let’s Misbehave,” from 1927 — was revived to accompany a drinking scene. But the other nine outside songs were shoehorned in with scant relevance to the characters or the plot.

In its most avoidable musical misstep, this production took “Well, Did You Evah! (What a Swell Party This Is),” in which Crosby and Sinatra swapped one-liners, and turned it into an ensemble in which the men barely appeared.

I sympathize with musical director Douglass G. Lutz, who had only eight musicians to accompany those classic Porter songs.

Arnoldy is a brash belter who’s best when she’s loud and not so appealing when singing softly. Ben Dibble, a stylish and graceful successor to the Jimmy Stewart/Sinatra role as the magazine reporter who crashed the party, stole the show whenever he was on stage. He croons romantically, too. Grace Gonglewski’s considerable talents were underused in the role of Tracy’s mother. Dan Schiff fared well with the crude character of Tracy’s skirt-chasing uncle. Jon Reinhold had the unenviable task of playing the pompous fiancée, yet he excelled with his strong baritone singing.

To read another review by Naomi Orwin, click here.