Following their triumphant production of The Ferryman, Tony®-winning Playwright Jez Butterworth and Oscar and Tony-winning Director Sam Mendes reunite for The Hills of California.
In the sweltering heat of a 1970s summer, the Webb sisters return to their childhood home in Blackpool, an English seaside town, where their mother Veronica lies dying upstairs. Gloria and Ruby now have families of their own. Jill never left. And Joan? No one’s heard from her in twenty years… but Jill insists that their mother’s favorite won’t let them down this time.
The run-down Sea View Guest House is haunted by bittersweet memories of amusement park rides and overdue bills. Back in the 1950s, each night the girls rehearse their singing act, managed by their fiercely loving single mom. But when a record producer offers a shot at fame and a chance to escape, it will cost them all dearly.
Whereas The Ferryman had death in its name yet packed the stage with warm-blooded life—animals and children, drink and dance and harvest festivities—The Hills of California, acts as its reverse image. The title, taken from the Johnny Mercer tune, is all glowing, crooning mid-century dreaminess, a life of sunny days and glamorous blue Pacific nights. But those hills are as distant and untouchable as the horizon, and the play they loom over is heavy with death. The result is that Butterworth—who puts plays together like machines, calibrated for passion or pathos at the pull of a certain lever—has less to hide behind. The sheer exuberant maximalism of The Ferryman went a long way toward obscuring, even at times absolving, the show’s overdependence on some pretty trite types and twists. In The Hills of California, Butterworth’s calculations are exposed. He’s cooking with the same stock, but the soup has gotten unappetizingly thin.
It’s not the playwright’s best (that’s “Jerusalem,” which Mark Rylance was explosive in on Broadway) or his grandest (that’d be “The Ferryman”). But “Hills” has an appealing haunted atmosphere, even if the ghosts aren’t specters, but traumas. And in its dreamy third act, the play distinguishes itself from the many, many dramas about kids caught in the web of their parent’s pipe dream.
2024 | West End |
West End |
2024 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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