Bell

Bell, Book and Candle

"enchanting"
Christopher Hoile, Stage Door

Written by John van Druten, featuring Liza Balkan, Phi Bulani, Ian Deakin, Elana Post and Eric Woolfe in the cast. The production was directed and designed by Douglas Beattie with lighting by Renée Brode. Julie Miles was the stage manager, assisted by Leslie Jost.

Bell, Book and Candle ran for 9 performances, February 16 - 24, 2007.

The Premise
A beautiful and powerful witch, disenchanted with her lifestyle and looking for something different, has her eye on a handsome and unsuspecting gent who lives in the apartment upstairs. Unfortuately she hasn't much time to attract his attention. The question is, can she make him like her in a week without tricks or will she have to resort to magic.

From Touchmark's Press Release dated January 15, 2007:
Elana Post who appeared as Juliet in last season's Touchmark production of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is returning to play Gillian... Phi Bulani makes his Touchmark debut as Shep, the gent from upstairs. Liza Balkan returns... to play Gillian's Aunt Queenie. Many will remember her performances as Doto in A Phoenix Too Frequent (2004) and Sister Marie in Blessings in Disguise (2005). Ian Deakin will appear as Redlitch, a journalist researching "Witchcraft Around Us". He appeared previously at River Run Centre as Frank... in Educating Rita and as Michael James in Touchmark's The Playboy of the Western World (2001). Eric Woolfe is returning to Touchmark as Gillian's ne'er-do-well brother Nicky. Eric played in Touchmark's debut production, Kingdom of Earth (1999) and starred as Tom in The Glass Menagerie (2003).

Playwright
An Anglo-American playwright, director, screenwriter and novelist, John van Druten (1901 - 57) was born in London, educated at University College School and worked as a solicitor and a lecturer in law and legal history at the University College of Wales before launching his playwriting career in 1928 with Young Woodley. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1944. His forte was comedy about everyday people, his particular focus, on women and their relationships with men. His best known plays are I Am a Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, later adapted as the hit musical Cabaret; The Voice of the Turtle; Bell, Book and Candle and I Remember Mama. He was acclaimed for his direction of the Broadway production of The King and I.

The movie version of Bell, Book and Candle came out in 1958, a year after his death. It featured Kim Novak, James Stewart, Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs.

Bell, Book and Candle was first produced at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York City, November 14, 1950.

Director's Notes
"Originally Bell, Book and Candle was a rather more serious play," John van Druten told an interviewer for Theatre Arts Magazine in 1952. "I asked myself what constitutes witchcraft, and I felt the answer lies in the fact that witches primarily seem to exist for their own self-gratification... (However) one has to stop living in terms of 'self' if aspects of love... are ever to be realized.".

While the charm of the play owes a great deal to its witchiness, its true delight for me lies in its very human story of a proud and self-centred young woman wrestling with the perils of deceit and finally realizing what it takes to become a truly vulnerable and loving person. With his customary sensitivity and shrewd observation, van Druten peopled his comedy with complex and endearing characters which still make a lasting impression on us. The play seems as emotionally valid in 2007 as it was in 1950 and every bit as pleasurable.

Reviews
"Unlovable characters played with panache" (headline)... the actors perform with gusto and sharp comic timing. Elana Post and Phi Bulani are appropriately cast in the lead roles - she is bewitching and he is suitably ga-ga as Shep... Eric Woolfe is despicable in all the right ways... Liza Balkan seems to enjoy every moment on stage and Ian Deakin is just right... Because of the play's vintage, some jokes that would have been racy at the time are cutely mild by today's standards. But the underlying message of the play - a variation on the theme that you can't buy love - remains as relevant as ever. The result is indeed a kind of magic. It's not a grandiose, jaw-dropping illusion by any stretch, but instead a charming, crowd pleasing diversion akin to a coin being pulled from behind your ear.
Colin Hunter, The Record

... The play posits a world now familiar from Bewitched (ed: a TV sit-com inspired by Bell, Book and Candle) or the Harry Potter novels where witches live among us in the everyday world. They look exactly like ordinary humans except that they have learned ways of controlling the forces of nature. Their rules, though, as laid down by Harry Potter's Ministry of Magic, are that any magic they perform must appear to be a coincidence. At the centre of the story is the voluptuous Manhattan witch Gillian Holroyd (much more alluring than TV's Samantha), who has become dissatisfied with her life as a witch and has grown attracted to her tenant upstairs, the oblivious Shepherd Henderson (i.e. the Darrin figure)...

Van Druten's special take on witches, including Gillian, is that they are selfish. They use magic to take "short cuts", as he calls it... to get what they want and to please only themselves... Van Druten's notion... does make the central female role a challenge. For the first two acts Gillian must seem cold and rather cruel in her pursuit of Shepherd. Elana Post, looking stunning and imperious, plays this well, but, inevitably, we become most engaged with her character when... she realizes that she has actually fallen in love, has lost her powers and her past self has been exorcised... Post expertly distinguishes between the invulnerable and vulnerable Gillians and makes this transformation the heart of the play.

Phi Bulani is excellent as Shepherd. He has innocent good looks and a sort of artless, puppy-dog charm that completely contrast with Post's Gillian and, indeed, help explain why she would be attracted to someone who has all the softness she seems to lack. Bulani is especially good at depicting the hapless Shepherd when he is under Gillian's spell and finds himself in an inexplicable state of bliss. He is hilarious in physical comedy as when he is drawn against his will as if by magnetism into Gillian's apartment.

Rounding out the superlative cast... (Woolfe's) mischievous expression and the tart way he delivers his lines make the character a constant pleasure... Balkan is gifted with a brilliant sense of comic timing and it shows here in every scene she's in... Deakin brings off Redlitch's hilarious combination of inebriation and pedantry with panache.

What is missing from the play is a concentration of witty dialogue. Compared to another supernatural comedy like Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, van Druten's language tends to be rather ordinary. He seems to look for humour in, what would have been in 1950, his highly unusual portrait of witches as our contemporaries without the pointed hats and magic wands. However our experience of shows like Bewitched or the Harry Potter novels have made us familiar with this idea and have blunted what would otherwise have been a sequence of unusual surprises in the play. What remains effective is van Druten's gallery of comic supporting characters and the more sublime comedy of Gillian's internal struggle and of Shepherd's confusion, explicitly compared to that of Shakespeare's character Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As usual the play is impeccably directed and designed by Douglas Beattie... Beattie's 1950's apartment for Gillian features a figure on its back wall that initially suggests a stylized tree... Under Renée Brode's highly effective lighting, when Gillian casts a spell, two paintings under the tree's two branches light up and suddenly seem to become large malevolent eyes.

Once again Touchmark has brought professional theatre on the same high level as the Shaw Festival to Guelph. Top-notch performances and insightful direction make Bell, Book and Candle an enchanting comedy that both entertains and enlightens.
Christopher Hoile, Stage Door

Touchmark Theatre and Douglas Beattie have done it again: wonderfully entertaining with a hint of thought comedy... just when we need a break from the long winter days.
Irena Syrokomla, Echo Germanica