As Bertie Wooster himself might have said in the circumstance, “What ho?”
Here is Alan Ayckbourn, one of Britain’s most brilliant contemporary playwrights, joining forces with the grandly operatic Andrew Lloyd Webber in an attempt to make a musical out of the classic but light-hearted Jeeves and Wooster books by the inimitable comic genius P.G. Wodehouse.
Not only that, but this is Ayckbourn and Webber’s second go at the thing. They tried an earlier Jeeves and Wooster musical adaptation in London 20 years ago and it proved as big a disaster as the time Bertie got the pig mask stuck on his face.
“The people who should have been converted (to Wodehouse) weren’t,” said Ayckbourn, “and people who were actually Wodehouse fanatics wrote to me in droves saying this is all wrong.”
But, what ho! This time, with a complete redo, Ayckbourn and Webber have got it right and have produced a huge success! Now running all this summer at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, with a New York run planned for the forthcoming season (date and theater to be announced), their “By Jeeves” is packing them in.
The critics love it too. Even the sometimes disgruntled Washington Post critic Lloyd Rose called the redone work “a very, very, very funny play.”
But before explaining how they pulled it off, a brief explanation of “what ho.”
Much like the Americanism “what’s happenin’, man?,” “what ho” is both greeting and interrogatory. But it is also exclamation, usually uttered as “what ho!” rather than “what ho?”
Consider this exchange from Wodehouse’s “My Man Jeeves:”
” `What ho!’ I said.
`What ho!’ said Motty.
`What ho! What ho!’
`What ho! What ho! What ho!’
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.”
This is the sort of thing that goes on at the Drones, Bertie Wooster’s uniquely Wodehouseian but quite genuinely British gentleman’s club, a place where they would not say, “What’s happenin’?,” but where they often have food fights.
Bertie, of course, is an upper-class British twit, but a most well-intended and endearing one. Jeeves is his long-suffering, unflappable, supremely clever, painfully correct and really cool butler.
Both are the creations of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), whose literary modus operandi was mostly to fling Bertie into tubs of trouble and send in Jeeves to haul him out.
Though most of their adventures seem to be set vaguely in the 1920s, Wodehouse first introduced Jeeves in a 1917 short story called “Extricating Young Gussie” and the first Jeeves and Wooster novel didn’t appear until 1934’s “Thank You, Jeeves.” He produced some 15 Jeeves books in all.
Wodehouse, who spent a considerable part of his life in America, considered names one of the greatest challenges of his work–a challenge, he handily met, with such monikers as Honoria Glossop, Madeline Bassett, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Harold “Stinker” Pinker (a clergyman), Stiffy Byng (a girl) and Bingo Little.
The challenge for Ayckbourn in wrestling Jeeves and Wooster to the stage is that so much of the appeal of the two lay in Wodehouse’s literary descriptive powers, as with:
“She gave a smirk that sounded like a nor’easter ripping through the sails of a stricken vessel.”
And, “The Right Honorable (gentleman) was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say `When.’ “
As well as, “In times of domestic crisis, Jeeves has the gift of creating the illusion that he is not there.”
There have been numerous attempts over the years to adapt Wodehouse to the performing arts, including the Arthur Treacher movies “Thank You, Jeeves” and “Step Lively, Jeeves,” Edward Duke’s two-character one-man show “Jeeves Takes Charge” and the quite popular Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie “Jeeves and Wooster” TV series, appearing here on public television’s “Masterpiece Theater.”
In first attempting his musical, Ayckbourn, author of “Absurd Person Singular” and “Absent Friends” among other highly regarded works, made an excruciating effort to be faithful to the original.
“I approached with a little too much deference to the work,” he said. “I really wanted to bring him to the stage and share him with a lot of people who hadn’t seen him before.”
But with the first effort a flop, he came to see that his error lay in trying to transport whole Wodehouse’s prose and plot lines into theater.
“Quite honestly, it’s hard to tell one story from the other,” Ayckbourn said. “They all blur into one. It doesn’t really matter if you start one in the middle or the ending, you just walk into that world. I then chucked the books to one side and started off on a story of my own. I realized there was nothing I could get from the books per se. Not one single line I could pull out and say, `Ah there we are, this has the makings of a good strong plot line for something on the stage.’ You have to use your own plot line.”
He read the Wodehouse canon until he became imbued with it all–“possessed by him if you like”–then began crafting a new story.
“I sort of arrogantly went ahead and said, `Right. I’m steeped as deep as I can be in him; now I’m going to go ahead as though I were writing a play of my own, but with his characters.’ The result is that I’ve had very few letters from the Wodehouse purists.”
The earlier version also had been a typical big Webber musical, with big set, big songs and big budget.
“The result was chaos,” Ayckbourn said.
As it was Webber imploring him over the years for another try, rather than vice versa, Ayckbourn was able to persuade the world-famous composer to give him complete control of the new effort.
Now the work is rather minimalist, with scenery running to automobiles made from cardboard boxes–to hilarious effect.
In this new version, Bertie (John Scherer), Jeeves (Richard Kline) and all the gang frolic on a rather bare stage, attempting to put on a small-time local village theatrical–and banjo concert–based on Bertie’s recollection of a singular adventure he had. It somehow has to do with hedgehogs and a rich American, and Bertie’s trying to help sort out mismatched romances involving Honoria, Bingo, Stiffy and all.
The music is light and amusing, with numbers along the lines of “It’s a Pig.” The romantic ballad “When Love Arrives” begins to border on Webber schmaltz, until a rosebush gets pulled up half way through.
“He (Webber) just roared with laughter (at that),” said Ayckbourn. “He thought it was a wonderful idea to do this. It sort of debunked the number. And it’s exactly what (`Stinker’) Pinker would do.”
Some snatches of remembered Wodehouse plots turn up — the stuck pig mask, Bertie’s burgling the wrong lady’s room, Bertie’s running afoul of a lady friend’s magistrate relation after a carouse.
Though it is otherwise absolutely Ayckbourn’s story — especially the banjo joke ending — it still seems the purist Wodehouse.
“I was flattered when someone (at the Kennedy Center) came up the first night and said, `I wouldn’t want to do this with an American cast,” Ayckbourn said. “I said, `We just did.’ “
The entire cast is American. Scherer, who as Rose notes may be a little too bright to be Bertie, played Joe Gillis on Broadway in Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard.” Kline, who starred in Broadway’s “City of Angels,” first won fame as Larry on television’s “Three’s Company.”
“I’ve done Noel Coward and Shakespeare,” said Kline, “but this is the only other English role I’ve done. I’d say the farthest thing from it would be my television thing on `Three’s Company.’ “
The other characters are equally inspired. Nancy Anderson is an incredibly fluttery Madeline, Donna Lynne Champlin a delightfully gallumphing Honoria and Emily Loesser a spiffy Stiffy. Nicolas Colicos as the rich American Cyrus Budge III, James Kall as Gussie and Ian Knauer as Stinker could easily step into the Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie Masterpiece Theater TV series.
“They do quite well,” Ayckbourn said. “This sort of English is a foreign language now to quite a lot of English actors. To the American cast, it was quite a leap, but they really worked at it.”
Part of the success of “By Jeeves’ ” success, of course, is the affection that American audiences and readers continue to have for Wodehouseian England, even though it may no longer exist.
“It sort of reminds me a little of my own childhood,” said Ayckbourn. “The way I saw the world then, which was big hedges and lots of village life going on around me.
“I suppose we live in a world of almost continuous nostalgia. Miss Marple peddling away through the countryside. The feeling that that was a world when all was sane, although in the case of Miss Marple people were getting murdered — sometimes several in a minute.
“I don’t know why the Americans are so fond of it, except they really do love to cling, even now, to the image of the Englishman in the bowler hat and the butler. We find it even in the most seasoned and well-traveled American, who knows bloody well that no longer exists outside perhaps of 10 homes in Britain.”
And, as Kline noted, there’s a great feeling of safety and security in Wodehouse, with Jeeves very much a father figure.
“Of course, Bertie gets into terrible straits,” Ayckbourn said. “But you know there’s never going to be anything life endangering. The worst that happens is he gets stuck behind a sofa or falls into a pond or something.
“Or he gets engaged.”
Actually, the way Honoria gallumphs, that might be endangering.
