A version of this review originally appeared on EW.com
Even if you’re not familiar with David Lean’s 1946 movie melodrama Brief Encounter, you will find yourself caught up in British writer-director Emma Rice’s brilliantly reconceived stage adaptation, now running at Broadway’s Studio 54 following a successful run last winter at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse. (EW’s original review). Despite playing in a much-larger theater, the show loses nothing of its considerable wit or charm.
The play, set in 1930s England, charts the brief love affair between middle-aged housewife Laura (Hannah Yelland, both forthright and touching) and married physician Alec (a solid Tristan Sturrock). But Rice has restructured Noël Coward’s original story and amplified it with musical numbers (the songs come from the Coward songbook, naturally). Rice also provides a fresh take on a romance usually noted for its stiff-upper-lip restraint: She downplays the melodrama (and the Rachmaninoff score of the Lean film) and heightens the comedy through the foregrounding of minor characters.
As befits what is now a musical comedy, we also get parallel couples: In addition to Laura and Alec, we meet the gawky tea girl Beryl (a delightful Dorothy Atkinson) and her cigarette-boy beau, Stanley (Gabriel Ebert) as well as Beryl’s lusty boss, Myrtle (Annette McLaughlin), and train dispatcher Albert (Joseph Alessi, who also plays Laura’s second-fiddle husband). Laura and Alec thus serve as straight-man foils for all the human comedy that surrounds them. The effect is to mitigate the potential sappiness of the material.
The narrative speeds merrily along, aided by some wickedly smart stagecraft from Rice’s Kneehigh Theatre of Cornwall. Neil Murray’s costumes and versatile set smartly transform the space into multiple locations, from suburban home to railway station. Gemma Carrinton and Jon Driscoll’s projections cleverly bridge the gap between stage and screen: At one point, the characters literally leap through a screen on the stage, then appear as figures on the film projections. These technical innovations would mean nothing if Rice and her spot-on cast were not serving the story. And that they do. This show is still a pip.
One final bit of advice: Don’t rush out the door after the curtain call. The fun continues in the back of the auditorium as the show’s onstage ensemble perform a series of decidedly modern tunes in throwback period style while playing banjo, ukulele, stand-up bass, and spoons. You’ve never heard Journey’s ”Don’t Stop Believin”’ or Sister Sledge’s ”We Are Family” in quite the same way. A-