PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, Melbourne Theatre Company at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, Melbourne Theatre Company, 8 November-23 December 2014. Photography by Jeff Busby: Bernadette Robinson.
After the runaway success of their first collaboration, the delightful Songs For Nobodies, it was surely too much to ask that they might do something else, but they have. The playwright and the performer: symbiosis defined. Joanna Murray-Smith and Bernadette Robinson.
In dreaming up Miss Harper Clare Clements from Thunderbolt, Georgia, Murray-Smith hands Robinson a fiction so plausible that two members of the audience were heard, on their way out of the theatre, arguing about whether or not there is a biography or autobiography of the White House social secretary that one might purchase and so discover more about her…
Murray-Smith’s imagination is on fire these days: the last – entirely fictitious – days of Patricia Highsmith are currently playing out in the Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera House (see review here – Switzerland) while Bernadette Robinson breathes life and heart into a woman who might be an amalgam of the real-life Letitia Baldridge, Capricia Marshall, Julianna Smoot, Samantha Tubman and Desiree Rogers (an extravagant name seems de rigueur for the post) but as written by the sharply funny and observant Murray-Smith, is more like CJ Cregg from the West rather than East Wing.
And the location, of course, is part of the thrill of this new work: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, aka the White House, is one of the best known and most powerfully romantic addresses in the world. Official residence and workplace of the leader of the free world, you don’t have to be a politics wonk to find it instantly exciting.
Set designer Shaun Gurton and lighting designer Nick Schlieper place the action in the Blue Room of the White House. It’s a stylised and simple place with a prominent chandelier (brought in by Jackie when she redecorated, Harper tells us) and framed portraits of early presidents as the only decoration. These frames also double as windows on her world as she takes us back through her 40 years in the service of six presidents: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush and Clinton.
The presidents – and First Ladies – are the hooks on which are hung the singers who entertained them in various ways, command performances and otherwise. The show opens with Marilyn Monroe’s famously breathless version of “Happy Birthday to you…” and Harper reveals how the fabulous star was able to inhabit that gown without what would later by identified by the women’s magazines as a “visible panty line”.
Harper’s assistance to Miss Monroe occurs because she is a lowly assistant to the assistant to the deputy to someone else who eventually reports to the Social Secretary. She is young and overawed and is yet to be burdened by the weight of protocol and what she can and cannot do. So she does it. Whether something like it happened or not, Robinson’s ability to morph in an instant between Southern naif Harper and the unique voice and mannerisms of Monroe make it entirely plausible – and so charming that you want it to have happened anyway.
As documented in a leisurely and meandering fashion by Harper as she rises through the ranks, White House galas and inauguration celebrations over the decades brought anyone who was anyone to sing for the President (whether he liked it or not and apparently JFK didn’t – it was all Jackie). So suddenly the voices – and physical characteristics – of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Maria Callas are conjured up by the remarkable Robinson.
Deliciously, the playwright slips in a real-life spat between Tammy Wynette and Hillary Clinton to make a snarkily humorous point about the difference between the two. (While Tammy sang about “standing by your man” she married and divorced five times, but Hillary actually did it!) And, of course, Bernadette gets to belt out that most lugubrious anthem of wronged wives made famous by the horse-faced queen of country.
And that’s the key to this clever show: the real alongside the make-believe and who can tell the difference, or care very much frankly, as Miss Harper Clements continues to pack her cardboard box as she prepares to leave the White House. As the years and stories go on, there is more than a touch of Zelig as Harper relates how she got on with Richard M Nixon (a nice man); what Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were like (more astonishing impersonations) and a door opens on the Vietnam war which enables Robinson to briefly and thrillingly transform into Bob Dylan for Eve of Destruction.
Ironically, the vaguely unsuccessful characters are Eartha Kitt, who became her own caricature anyway and, like Barbra Streisand, was for long too much of a parody to satisfactorily bring down to earth. That aside, with Simon Phillips directing and an excellent band behind the blue drapes led by Ian McDonald, Robinson is free to not only sing and impersonate as brilliantly as we know she can, but also to act and sustain a character she has to fashion into three dimensional life without pre-existing props.
Miss Harper Clare Clements starts out as a perky gal from the Deep South and ends up a sardonic and sad sophisticate; but one who’s still in love with the magic of the White House and those she met along the way. Bernadette Robinson’s rich performance and Joanna Murray-Smith’s nerve in dreaming up and carrying this show through to fruition – an hour and forty minutes of story, song and engrossing entertainment. The season has already been extended, tickets are galloping out the door: don't miss it.
