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.
Butterworth writes sprawling, talky epics with ensembles in the double digits, three-hour run times, and lots of room for showy speeches. He’s fascinated by the death of dreams and the past that haunts us, the slow decay of England. Hills is not essentially different, thought it does focus on women. Men in this world—save one—are feckless husband-enablers and punching bags for Veronica and her mostly unhappy grown daughters. The one man who makes a definitive impact on the Webb household is the Yank talent scout, Luther, played by New York stage veteran David Wilson Barnes. Seeming at first a dryly reserved finder of genius (he claims to have discovered Nat King Cole), Luther reveals darker motives by requesting a private audition with 15-year-old Joan (Lara McDonnell) in “Mississippi” (Seaview’s rooms are named after American states). What makes the offstage encounter between Luther and Joan more disturbing is the suggestion that the girl initiates it—a tragic escape from her suffocating surroundings.
Laura Donnelly plays both the thirtysomething Joan and, in the flashbacks, mother Veronica. It’s an astonishing dual performance. As the would-be, maybe nearly-was rock star Joan, Donnelly pitches her voice to a cigarette-stained California hippie burnout with only a hint of the Blackpool roots she so clearly has worked mightily to eradicate. As Veronica, Donnelly is a stage mother wannabe with arguably good intentions, a smart, talented woman smothered by the times and desperate to give her daughters the opportunities she never had. Equal parts Mama Rose, Miss Jean Brodie, Amanda Wingfield and Sophie Zawistowska, Veronica is a monster for an instantly regretted minute, and she and those she loves will pay for that lapse the rest of their lives.
2024 | West End |
West End |
2024 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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