Theater: Birkshire Theatre Festival / 6 East Main Street, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 01262
Synopsis:
Terrified that his wife is bound for infidelity, an actor decides to test her loyalty by doing what he does best: putting on a character. And so begins The Guardsman, a hilarious tale of treachery, deception, and assumed identities that has inspired three separate films. The actor's charade grows more and more complicated as he realizes that the Guardsman is a harder role to tackle than he ever could have imagined. Witty, charming, and delightfully clever.
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July 20, 2010: Is an actor ever truly offstage? Ferenc Molnar’s comedy “The Guardsman” turns on the notion that the question is essentially rhetorical. The husband and wife who earn their living before the footlights in this backstage romance are striking poses and reaching for effects even when their only audience is a hand mirror.
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July 21, 2010: Ferenc Molnar's 1910 Viennese confection, The Guardsman (Testor, in its original Hungarian version), didn't become a hit, until 1924 when Alfred Lunt played the insecure actor who stages an elaborate masquerade to test his wife's fidelity and Lunt's wife Lynne Fontanne played the is-she-or-isn't-she faithful wife. That production not only turned the corner for the play but established Lunt and Fontanne as the theater's favorite husband and wife team. Its several film versions included one starring the actors who made it a hit (the only movie they ever made). With the plot similar to Mozart's opera cosi fan tutti, it's not surprising that the play was also musicalized — in 1941 as the operetta The Chocolate Soldier and in 1990 as a small book musical, Enter the Guardsman
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July 20, 2010: How many great actors does it take to truly put over Ferenc Molnár's The Guardsman? We may never know, because the highly skilled company doing the heavy lifting under John Rando's vigorous direction at the Berkshire Theatre Festival fails to achieve liftoff.
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