Matthew Broderick leads a successful, if not always faithful, adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Jazz age satire. The framing device of ensemble members reading The Very Book in a public library of today, backed up by the dramaturg’s note, encourages audiences to engage with this hundred-year-old masterpiece, and that’s to the good.
While George Babbitt’s journey—from Republican conformity to soft-core rebellion, returning to the arms of the Good Citizens League (strong hints of It Can’t Happen Here in this adaptation)—is preserved, the dialogue is modernized, stripping out nearly all of the jargon and colloquialisms of the 1920s. This sweetening is probably also a good idea, as some of Lewis’s passages would be incomprehensible as spoken word today.1 Babbitt does retain an occasional “Zowie!” or “That’s the stuff!”
Any adaptation must condense, consolidate, and excise, but I do miss the excursion to the realtors’ (S.A.R.E.B.) convention in Monarch. The unmitigated, vacant boosterism of George Babbitt and his clan is what makes him so endearing, or insufferable, as you will.
In the final break with Tanis, the roles are reversed from the book to the stage, for some reason.
Broderick brings a nice physicality to the role. In the first act, his George is so buttoned-up that his wildest gestures wouldn’t collide with the walls of a telephone booth.2 Encouraged to sit on a floor cushion in Tanis’s flat, George makes heavy weather of getting down. Don’t worry, George loosens up and even cuts a rug in the second act. Vocally, Broderick has chosen a dweeby squeak somewhere in the neighborhood of Wally Cox. It’s funny, but blustering George needs a rumbly baritone.
First among the ensemble of seven is Matt McGrath, handling the equally odious Charley McKelvey and his antagonist Seneca Doane.
1Check out the parody (?) Prince Albert Tobacco ad from Chapter VIII, spoken of with reverence by poetaster Chum Frink.
- Babbitt, by Joe DiPietro, adapted from the novel by Sinclair Lewis, directed by Christopher Ashley, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Harman Hall, Washington
File this note under ICYMI, as the show closed last weekend.