Sam Free and Bella King in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Ryan Parker
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Have you lost your sense of fun?
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If it’s crossed your mind lately to wonder how on earth everything has turned out much worse that you ever imagined, it might just be the moment for a screwball comedy in your life.
Teatro Live! pops the cork on one, starting Friday, with a revival, the first since 2010, of Stewart Lemoine’s 2001 On The Banks of the Nut. In the course of it you’ll meet a heroine who, in classic screwball fashion, takes charge of people’s lives and screws them up — in a good way.
Bella King, who plays Noreen Cuthburt, calls her, appreciatively, “very relentlessly positive. No moments of anxiety. She is never worried…. She does a lot of problem-solving for everyone!” King, who has a kind of sunny buoyancy about her in conversation, does concede that Noreen “tells a lot of lies. But not (maliciously). And she has a way of bringing out other people’s honesty.” .
Built into screwball comedies is “the element of having a good time,” says Lemoine, who’s written more than a few, including Vidalia, Skirts On Fire, Whiplash Weekend, For The Love of Cynthia. De rigueur is “an exhilaration, an exuberance in trying to solve everything.” A screwball, he thinks, is different than the door-slamming frenzy of farces, “hiding things in a contained space…. A screwball is free-range. Kind of amiable.”
He points to one of the classics of the genre, the 1938 Howard Hawks screwball Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn as “a madcap heiress who blithely sails through life, as everyone’s else’s turns to chaos,” as Lemoine summarizes. The heroine in screwball comedies tends to be “a young woman who’s a bit of an imp.”
In On The Banks Of The Nut, one of Lemoine’s favourites in his own archive of screwballs, Noreen, a temp, finds herself working for a “federal talent agent” charged with finding “a citizen of rare ability.” Since agent Pinkerton Sprague (Sam Free) hasn’t got a clue how to go about this assignment, Noreen immediately steps up. What ensues is an adventure in the Wisconsin hinterland in 1951. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. So, OK, Noreen takes charge of his life for him,” grins King.
Lemoine calls it “taking temping to the ultimate.” Noreen “steps into a situation,” notes that “this isn’t working, so we’ll try that.” As she says, “you can’t just put your oars in the water without rowing,” or words to that effect. And she “reinvents everyone’s lives.”
If you saw Teatro’s original musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s you’ll have appreciated King’s comic (and musical) versatility. She played the prim by-the-rulebook manager of the title nightclub, who discovers, during a show-stealing encounter at a bus stop that she might just be a wee bit attracted to the establishment’s bartender (Josh Travnik).
Since she graduated from MacEwan’s musical theatre program, King has taken her air of wholesome innocence and great pipes into an assortment of ingenue roles. Fringe audiences have seen her in musicals, both the homegrown and Off-Broadway variety ([title of show] and High School Musical, for example). In Plain Jane’s 2020 production of the musical Fun Home, she was the middle of the musical’s three Allisons, who discovered she was gay at about the same time she discovered the same thing about her dad.
“I look back on it now as a life-changer,” she says of Fun Home, the heartbreaking musical itself, and enhanced for her by the experience of being in it alongside Plain Jane artistic director Kate Ryan, a long time teacher and mentor. And earlier this season King was Janet, half the pair of innocents whose eyes are opened wide in Grindstone’s Rocky Horror Show.
Actually music does figure prominently in On The Banks Of The Nut. But it’s by heavy-hitters like Mozart and Mahler, never big in hum-along circles. For the first time since high school King is in a play not a musical. But she does find does find “something musical, and lyrical” in Lemoine’s writing for characters who are amusingly literate and articulate. “Really long thoughts,” she smiles. “You know exactly when you’ve said the wrong word!”
Lemoine explains why the eminent composer Gustav Mahler makes his long overdue crewball comedy debut at Teatro in On The Banks Of The Nut. This happens when the eccentric proprietor of Nut River Lodge (Rachel Bowron) visits Chicago, goes to a Chicago Symphony concert, and falls for the post-horn player (Mathew Hulshof) in Mahler’s Third Symphony. It’s a work on a grand scale, as Lemoine points out, “with a contralto and also a choir with women and children.” And the post-horn has “an amazing sound and is murder to play, an archaic instrument with no valves.” Lemoine implies that this is all prime screwball material.
This summer King returns to musicals in two Fringe shows. One is Uniform Theatre’s production of Sondheim’s dark and weird (and timely as hell) Assassins, with its gallery of dreamers who had a go at offing American presidents. Straight Edge Theatre, connoisseurs of dark comedy (Krampus, Conjoined), premieres their latest, Final Girl, spun from the horror movie trope.
Meanwhile, there’s a peppy and positive temp to play, alongside veteran Teatro stars Rachel Bowron and Mathew Hulshof (and making their Teatro debuts Karen Johnson Diamond and Sam Free). “They’re so funny, so rooted,” says King, who considers Bowron and Hulshof a veritable master-class in Lemoinian acting. “Their work is so detailed. Great energy to be around!”
And at this point in an exasperating anxiety-making year, Noreen is there, King smiles, “to take charge, give people a bit of hope.”
PREVIEW
On The Banks Of The Nut
Theatre: Teatro Live!
Written by: Stewart Lemoine
Directed by: Stewart Lemoine
Starring: Sam Free, Bella King, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Karen Johnson Diamond
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: Friday through June 15
Tickets: teatrolive.com
