Dust off your smoking jackets and shine up those martini glasses, because the Winter Park Playhouse is bringing out the best and swankiest hits from British playwright Noël Coward, best known for his comedic plays Blithe Spirit and Private Lives, in the musical revue “A Marvelous Party! The Noël Coward Celebration.”
The three-person show will star Roy Alan, Laura Hodos and Larry Alexander and is directed by Steven Flaa, who directed this show for the first time at The American Stage in St. Petersburg.
Before the show kicked off at the Winter Park Playhouse in Orlando, Alexander and Flaa sat down with Watermark to discuss Coward’s impact on theater and what we can expect from the show.
Watermark: Who was Noël Coward, for those who have never heard of him?
Alexander: He was born just before the turn of the century into 1900s in England.
Flaa: He started as an actor – a child actor – and then, because he was having trouble finding work, started writing his own musicals and plays, had tremendous early success, and just went from there. This is back in the days where you would spend two months writing a play and you would produce it and run it for 12 to 16 weeks, and it would be a success and then you call your friends and do another one.
A: And he wrote many different types.
F: He would write dramas, comedies, musicals, musical reviews. He was just really versatile in the kind of stuff he wrote. He did everything too; he wrote the words, the music and the lyrics. It was a one man operation. Plus he played some of the roles, and was sometimes the lead in the show.
Coward is as much known for his personality as he is for his work. Was he happy with the way the world saw him?
A: He has this kind of image, and we address it in the show, as this very sophisticated man wearing a smoking jacket with a cigarette holder and a goblet of Chablis.
F: It’s that very famous photo of him sitting in a chair with a dinner jacket with the cigarette holder and champagne; that’s just what people always assumed he was, but he wasn’t. He was a work horse.
A: But he was also so incredibly witty that it feeds into that whole sophisticated [image].
F: You know, back in the day when they had Salons and would sit around and be witty and go to lunch and laugh. Sorta like the New York round table, but in England many years before. He was just pretty brilliant.
A: And worked consistently for decades. Started around WWI and was running shows right up until the ‘60s, which is pretty amazing.
Did his sexuality play into that image? I mean, he was in the closet most of his life, wasn’t he?
A: He wasn’t closeted, they just didn’t discuss it.
F: It wasn’t something talked about, people just weren’t openly gay back then. He didn’t hide it, but he didn’t discuss it.
A: When you look back on it, there was a very famous painter, whose name I can’t remember, that was his protégé and probably boyfriend back when he was 16, and it was a very rich, wealthy, well-bred woman that sort of adopted him into her circle. The painter died very, very early, I think Noël Coward was 17 or 18 and she just took him in to her world and that’s how he met London society and got started in that whole niche.
F: Because he was born into the lower-middle class environment. He was not born into that class – at all – and everything was so class conscious; that’s what introduced him to that.
A: I would never, ever think of him as closeted, because I think everyone who was in his life [knew].
Coward kept a lot of diaries and journals in his life that are available to the public now. Did he write extensively about his sexuality in them?
F: He would talk about people in his life [in his writings], but he would never say ‘my boyfriend, so-and-so, this,’ but he had two very long term relationships; someone survived him.
A: His last partner survived him. They were together 40 years.
F: It just wasn’t something you discussed.
A: He died in ‘73. That’s just four years after Stonewall, so there wasn’t that much movement.
F: Plus you’ve got to remember where he came from. He came from virtually Victorian England.
A: And there are certainly clues; not in all of his work, but in some of his work. And the title of the song and show “Marvelous Party,” that’s as gay as it gets. I think the beauty of it is back when it was originally done it wasn’t even something you thought about. Like I always joke in rehearsal, I have this one line that I say ‘Everyone’s here and frightfully gay,’ and I yell at him, ‘IT MEANS HAPPY!’ [laughs] But it did.
F: But his stuff was so clever and witty that if you were gay, you got it.
He was most famously known for his theater work, but was he involved with film or television as well?
F: He also wrote for the screen. In fact, he wrote a very famous World War II movie called In Which We Serve, and was nominated for a bunch of Oscars. He’s actually in it, too. Noël Coward was very patriotic. He loved the United Kingdom. He was also in a terrible Elizabeth Taylor/ Richard Burton movie called Boom. He plays the Witch of Capris, which was a female role in the original play, but Noël Coward wanted to play her.
What are some of the Noël Coward hits we will hear in the show?
F: It runs the gamut of his career: “I Went to a Marvelous Party,” “Mrs. Worthington.” “If Love Were All” is probably the most famous song in the show. “Someday I’ll Find You,” which he wrote for Private Lives, a play that he wrote for Gertrude Lawrence, but they both loved to sing so much that even in his plays, he would write a song for them to sing.
More information:
What: A Marvelous Party! The Noël Coward Celebration
When: November 11-20 and December 1-11
Where: Winter Park Playhouse, Orlando
Tickets: $40, WinterParkPlayhouse.org
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