Review: BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE at Don Bluth Front Row Theatre

Scottsdale's Don Bluth Front Row Theatre celebrates Halloween this year with BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE, a hexy-sexy witch rom-com best known for its 1958 film version starring Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. This production is full of talented actors/comedians, but they're held in check by a bafflingly clunky staging and some suspect tech elements.

Written and set in 1950, BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE has Manhattan socialite and closeted witch Gillian Holroyd just back from an extended trip to Mexico. She discovers that her crush, publisher Shep Henderson, is only hours from announcing his engagement to her old college nemesis. Motivated by boredom, attraction, and revenge, Gillian performs a love spell. Shep immediately becomes ensorcelled. He cancels his engagement and begins an involuntary romance with Gillian.

A prominent non-fiction author investigating modern witchcraft for a book that Shep hopes to publish and the antics of Gillian's decadent brother and busybody aunt complicate the situation.

The latter two are also practitioners of magic. They reveal that if a witch falls in love she'll lose her powers. That premise has potential. Gillian falling in love would bring Shep to his senses and the project would collapse. And if Gillian does fall in love, she will never know if Shep loves her back or if the spell is still in place due to some dark part of her heart that can't quite experience love.

A lot to work with there!

Unfortunately those tropes go relatively unexplored in favor of a remarkably predictable Titania/Bottom meets Hepburn/Tracy courtship story. It's a play found in American community theatre Ring of Champions with shows like THE CURIOUS SAVAGE and ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, plays that have merit but are not overperformed so much for their quality as for their producibility.

It's easy to imagine the 1951, tuxedo-filled intermission lobby of the original Broadway production, the patrons tantalized by the idea of modern witches as attractive, sexually ambitious Manhattanites. Seventy years later, Witch Protagonists have seen it all from American Horror Story to Harry Potter to Wicked to WandaVision. Witchcraft isn't just mainstream, it's one of the most explored subjects in modern pop culture.

In 2021, BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE doesn't have the heightened tension of taboo that kept it relevant in mid-century America. Without the titillation of normalizing the supernatural, the plot is exposed as shallow and the characters hard to root for.

John Van Druten, the author of the show, is perhaps best known to Broadway fans as "Cliff" in CABARET, in that, Mr. Van Druten adapted Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical "Berlin Stories'' into the 1951 play I AM A CAMERA, which, in turn, became the beloved and acclaimed film and stage musical CABARET. Druten's numerous plays were well known for challenging social and sexual mores; his first play, YOUNG WOODLEY, was banned in London in 1928 for its attack on Britian's education system. With that pedigree, it's surprising that Mr. Van Druten would turn his attention to a Noel Coward derivative courtship piece.

Not so fast. It's widely accepted that, with BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE, Mr. Van Druten crafted an allegory for the incognito gay community of New York. Gillian's class and effortless sophistication living a considered-clandestine, closeted lifestyle is the source of her charm. That's where this current production falls apart. Gillian, as performed by Vivienne Davis, is akin to Samantha Stevens of TV's "Bewitched". That might work in a sequel to this story, where Gillian and Shep have settled down behind a white picket fence, but in BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE, it should be a little less Anna and a little more Elsa. Davis is talented and shows it in several places but is ultimately miscast, or misdirected, or both.

The five-person cast is full of comic skill. Paul Hartwell's truculence and indignation as Gillian's depraved brother and Martha Welty's delightful, busybody quirks as Aunt Queenie provide most of the laughs. J. Kevin Tallent works in some solid humorous moments as a witchcraft investigator oblivious that he's surrounded by witches.

Eric Schoen as Shep is an impressive, very natural actor when working beat to beat, but his "Aw, shucks", sheepish approach to Shepard isn't supported by what the character says and does or how he is described. He gets Shep's bewilderment when appropriate but his wooing of Gillian feels passive aggressive and mopey.

I was baffled by some elements of this show. It's a three-quarter-thrust and the Gillian's living room is the only location, so the set requires only a cocktail table and a few places to sit. Yet, the cast of RENT has nicer furniture. Gillian's chic Greenwich Village apartment has a wooden spool with a tablecloth pinned to it for a table and hastily assembled wooden stools with seat cushions attached for chairs. Miranda Priestly and Cruella de Vil don't succeed as characters without tremendous stylishness; neither does Gillian.

The playing space has several carpeted platforms filling 70% percent of the full floor. The furniture is placed in a way that forces the cast to step off and back on those platforms almost anytime they move more than a few feet. Distracted by that clunkiness, the actors lose momentum, connection, and stakes every time they cross the stage. The cast looked inconvenienced every time they needed to make an important point.

The issue is made more frustrating by the fact that the platforms are completely unnecessary for the sight lines and the carpet under the platforms is gorgeous, brand new, red, and completely appropriate to the setting.

Add to that, no one in the cast seemed to agree where the windows and doors were on the invisible three walls.

Shep, a professional Manhattan gentleman of means and social status, is heading out the door to his engagement party in a frumpy suit that doesn't fit and three weeks overdue for a haircut.

With all these frustrations circling, I couldn't begin to suspend judgment on Gillian for essentially using a date-rape drug to have her way with Shep. She's content to destroy Shep's life while knowing she doesn't even have long term plans for their fling. I wasn't interested in her story, her arc, any potential redemption or lessons learned.

I can't recommend anyone attend BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE, this production or any.

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