- Title: One Man, Two Guvnors
- Written by: Richard Bean
- Based on: The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni with songs by Grant Olding
- Director: Chris Abraham
- Actors: Peter Fernandes, Tom Rooney, Jade Repeta, Kiera Sangster, Matt Alfano, Martin Happer
- Company: The Shaw Festival
- Venue: Shaw Festival Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 13, 2024
Critic’s Pick
Three cheers aren’t enough for One Man, Two Guvnors at the Shaw Festival.
Chris Abraham, one of Canada’s foremost directors of comedy, has put together the flat-out funniest production of a farce that I’ve ever seen in Niagara-on-the-Lake – or anywhere else in Ontario for that matter.
British playwright Richard Bean’s 2011 commedia dell’arte-inspired comedy was the toast of the West End and Broadway in its original production starring James Corden; this one with Peter Fernandes as the lead matches and even tops it at times.
Playing Francis Henshall, the titular lackey to two low-lifes, Fernandes nails the unique comic challenges from his first appearance, in which he throws nuts very high up in the air and catches them in his mouth in what his character imagines is a menacing manner.
From there, Fernandes is off and running, full tilt on the physical comedy, gung-ho for every gross-out gag and demonstrating the quickest of wit in regular improvisations with the audience.
Lending its silly proceedings a veneer of sophistication, One Man, Two Guvnors is based on a 1743 Italian classic, Il servitore di due padroni by Carlo Goldoni.
Bean has reset the plot in the seaside town of Brighton in 1963 mainly, it seems, so that he can shoehorn in songs in the style of skiffle, that faux folk-country music the Beatles played before they were the Beatles. (A number of the cast members don shaggy wigs to double as a band playing goofy tunes from the genre to entertain before the show, at intermission and even during the scene changes of Julie Fox’s shape-shifting set.)
While its sound is skiffle, One Man, Two Guvnors’ plot is pure piffle – filled with, purposefully per its commedia roots, stock characters.
Rachel Crabbe (Fiona Byrne), the first of two ruffians to have Henshall on retainer, has disguised herself as her late gay gangster brother, Roscoe – and arrived in Brighton to claim Pauline Clench (Jade Repeta), the dopey daughter of local mobster Charlie (Tom Rooney), as “his” bride and beard.
Rachel is stepping into this arranged marriage in order to get the dowry money – and then get out of dodge with her upper-class lover, Stanley Stubbers (Martin Happer), who, as it happens, is the one who recently killed her brother.
But when Stanley shows up in Brighton looking for Rachel, he sends the second hoodlum to hire Henshall as a henchman after encountering him in the town square.
This means while Rachel and Stanley attempt to find each other, Henshall is doing everything to keep them apart so they don’t realize that he’s a gig worker to two gunmen.
Henshall’s antics are first in service to earning enough cash for a proper meal, and, later, as he forthrightly states through the fourth wall, to make enough money to take Charlie’s bookkeeper Dolly (Kiera Sangster) to Majorca.
The supporting cast is superb with Repeta elevating a dumb-blonde cliché to its dumbest and blondest, André Morin doing damage to artists’ reputations everywhere in his portrayal of an egotistical actor named Dangle, and Happer just perfect as a posh prat who came out of boarding school with the dirtiest of kinks, making the most debased dialogue I’ve ever heard on a Shaw Festival stage sound like the most elegant epigrams.
The true secondary star of the show, however, is Matt Alfano, a member of Shaw’s musical-theatre company who here uses his dance training to pull off impossible-seeming pratfalls.
In a scene borrowed from Goldoni where Henshall must serve lunch to both his patrons at once, Alfano plays an elderly waiter named Alfie who is constantly being smashed in the face by doors and falling down flights of stairs.
Is One Man, Two Guvnors more than just sad*stic spectacle? At its best, physical comedy is an art form that cuts all of humanity down to size even as it demands an elite commitment to craft from the cast and creative team at the level of ballet.
Abraham was no doubt aided in achieving the results he did here by fight director John Stead and movement director Alexis Milligan.
I could fill this review with superlatives, but the highest praise I can bestow on the show is, simply, that I walked out and immediately made plans to get tickets to see it again with my own hard-earned cash made as theatre-seeing servant of those two masters, The Globe and The Mail.
