Theatre in Review: Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening (59E59)

It is, sadly, appropriate that this entertainment has been booked into Theatre C, 59E59's tiniest venue. Gertrude Lawrence, one of the greatest stage stars of the twentieth century, is more than a little forgotten. The reasons are obvious: Her film resume is alarmingly brief; only the 1936 Charles Laughton vehicle Rembrandt is easily available. (Her greatest stage successes, Private Lives and Lady in the Dark, were filmed with Norma Shearer and Ginger Rogers, and her Broadway vehicle Skylark featured Claudette Colbert on the screen.) A leading musical theatre star in her youth -- in smart British revues and shows by the Gershwin brothers -- only her performance in The King and I was preserved on the original cast album. Her few available clips on YouTube only hint at the quicksilver personality that beguiled her contemporary audiences and critics.

None of this diminishes the many pleasures of this brief evening, which, thanks to the incandescent Lucy Stevens, author and star, gives us a sense of what Lawrence's star quality was all about. Under Sarah-Louise Young's brisk direction, the text trips lightly through her eventful life, beginning with a hardscrabble childhood marked by "moonlight flits" to escape vengeful landlords, continuing through years in the chorus, stardom, friendship with the Royal Family, her sometimes chaotic personal life, her scandalous financial ways, her bravery entertaining the troops in Europe after the Normandy invasion, and her lasting marriage to the theatre producer Richard Aldrich. Stevens' point of view is utterly sympathetic; we get little sense of the maddeningly impulsive, deeply self-involved sort whose flagrant overspending and indifferent parental performance sometimes drove her friends and lovers to distraction.

Still, Stevens understands that Lawrence's secret was her temperament, and she makes clear that a certain unmistakable narcissism undergirded her many grand gestures. Talking about her time with the troops in England, she says, "I sang my songs and then stood out in the farmyard waving as they headed for France. It was all like part of a film. There I stood in the brilliant sunshine, tears streaming down my face, waving goodbye to those young men. But, the show must go on, and we did, again, and again, and again we kissed them and waved them goodbye." It was like part of a film. And guess who was the star?

Then again, life would be much duller without such creatures -- indeed, there would be no theatre at all -- so we must be grateful when they come our way, and this piece is a powerful reminder of the hold that great stars have over us. Stevens, a glowing presence, is a much more powerful singer than Lawrence -- who Daphne du Maurier described as having a "lilting, sexless, choir boy voice" -- and she does beautiful, incisive, lyrical work with a song list ranging from chestnuts like "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" to a bouquet of Noel Coward and Kurt Weill evergreens.

Coward was, arguably, the most important influence in Lawrence's life, and she repaid the favor by treating his songs like the singular gems they are. Surprisingly, Stevens finds plenty of gusto in the enervated sentiments of Coward's "Dance, Little Lady ("So obsessed with second best/No rest you'll ever find") and the faintly naughty implications of his "Forbidden Fruit" ("Every peach out of reach is attractive/Cause it's just a little bit too far"). She is stirring in "London Pride," Coward's tribute to his favorite city in wartime, and oddly touching in "This is a Changing World," from his flop operetta Pacific 1860; in her rendition, it becomes the personal testament of woman who has seen it all. Although she performs a truncated version of Weill's "The Saga of Jenny," from Lady in the Dark, she has a good time recreating the star's bump-and-grind delivery, which shocked audiences in 1941. She also makes "My Ship," the show's gorgeous ballad, into an admission of her personal regrets. Most strikingly, she turns "Shall We Dance?," one of The King and I's signature numbers, into a valedictory statement.

If you want to get a deeper insight into Lawrence's life, you'll have to look elsewhere, perhaps Sheridan Morley's biography or Barry Day's collection of Coward's letters. But if you'd like to hear some smashing songs delivered by a singer of skill and intelligence, this is the ticket. This is one title with which one can thoroughly agree. --David Barbour