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Julie Andrews' voice of experience
Her directorial debut, 'The Boy Friend' at the DuPont Theatre, echoes her Broadway debut in that play 51 years ago
30 Sep 05 - delawareonline.com
By CHRISTOPHER YASIEJKO / The News Journal
Fifty-one years ago, a 19-year-old British actress named Julie Andrews introduced herself to Broadway audiences. She played the part of Polly Browne in "The Boy Friend," which Sandy Wilson wrote as a playful sendup of 1920s musical comedies. She already was a polished vocalist, but the role advanced Andrews' rise to stardom.
She had an Oscar in her future -- the title role in "Mary Poppins" earned her the 1964 Academy Award for best actress. With the 1971 publication of "Mandy," she began a second (and still thriving) career in children's books. And long after her part in "The Sound of Music" garnered another Oscar nomination, Andrews in 1995 returned to Broadway with "Victor/Victoria."
These days, younger generations are most likely to recall her performances in "The Princess Diaries" (2001), "The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement" (2004) and as the voice of Queen Lillian in the 2004 animated film "Shrek 2."
But here, in a small but striking opera house built in 1876 on the sleepy banks of the Connecticut River, Andrews once again is reinventing herself. This time, she is a director, and she knows her first play well.
In 1954, she played Polly, an English heiress who must deal with the social fallout when she falls for the delivery boy while at a finishing school on the French Riviera. In 2003, she directed "The Boy Friend" on a smaller scale at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, N.Y. It went well, and here she is, preparing for a national tour that stops first in Wilmington, with shows today through Oct. 9.
The plot and the set are simple but enchanting, a nod to the style that dominated musicals in the '20s, and anyone willing to suspend his or her disbelief for two hours is likely to leave the DuPont Theatre feeling thoroughly warm, fuzzy and at ease.
"There's a lot of sweet inanity that goes on," she says. "In this show you could play it for camp and some might enjoy that, but for me, a play that knows it's being camp is the kiss of death. So therefore I decided to have those campy moments played as real as possible."
Her version of the play, she says, splits the difference between the original London direction of Vida Hope, whose vision for "The Boy Friend" was as a tribute to the era, and the early Broadway direction of Cy Feuer, who presented it as a spoof.
"I don't think today's younger audience," Andrews says, "would even know what 1920s musicals were like."
She has "perhaps a tiny bit more confidence" than during her 2003 go-round. As a director, she describes herself as "very green," an appraisal similar to that which she gave herself when she played the part of Polly in 1954. She notes a significant difference between her Broadway and directorial debuts: "In those days, all I had to worry about was me."
Now she helps the members of her cast hone their approaches to speaking and singing, which, because of a surgery in 1997 to remove noncancerous nodes from her vocal chords, the once versatile Andrews no longer can revisit to the extent she'd like.
Of her potential strengths when she considered directing, Andrews says, "I realized that I can bring a big emphasis on the music and, in particular, the lyrics." When she guides a member of her cast through a song, she teaches them to "add the subtleties that I feel it can take" -- hold it a bit on the words "fancy free," for example, in the song of the same name. She tells them to treat the lyrics with "loving, teasing affection."
When she takes "The Boy Friend" to the DuPont Theatre today, Andrews transfers her production from a theater that seats 398 people to one that seats 1,251. The intimacy of Goodspeed allowed her to absorb the aisles as extensions of the stage. Actresses at one point thumped beach balls from one aisle to another, over the heads of audience members.
"There may not be access to the audience in the same way," she says of the DuPont Theatre, "so I may have to change that."
The cast of 16 dancing singers expands in Wilmington to 18, and the eight-piece orchestra adds two musicians.
Andrews is in Wilmington to kick off the show's tour, and the timing is such that, on Saturday, she'll celebrate her 70th birthday while in town. She says she understands Target, the tour's sponsor, has planned a party in her honor, "and I have a hunch that [husband] Blake [Edwards] has got something up his sleeve."
Much like the play she describes as "time suspended in a perfect little world," Andrews seems active and happy.
"I just think that I'm the luckiest woman alive," she says, "to be able to play in these little sandboxes."
Jessica Grové, who plays the role Andrews took to Broadway, told a reporter at The Wall Street Journal that the initial awe several cast members felt toward Andrews soon subsided -- "[A]fter a few days," she is quoted as having said, "she was just Julie, our director."
And, of course, Andrews prepares differently than she did when she stood in the spotlight.
"You think a lot," she says, "and you lie awake at night a lot. When you ingest a lot, thoughts come unbidden."
"I'm sure the more I do, the harder it will become."