Newspaper Article

THEATER REVIEW; Sprightly but short on sparks; 'Mr. Shaw Goes to Hollywood,' at Laguna Playhouse, has spirit but lacks the bite of its namesake's politically charged works

Shirley, Don

2003

Overview

The play's most bizarre incident, in which the Shaws' airplane is forced to land at Malibu and they hitch a ride into L.A. with a UCLA student, actually happened. So did other elements of [Mark Saltzman]'s plot, including [Marion Davies]' and [William Randolph Hearst]'s campaign to obtain the movie rights to [George Bernard Shaw]'s \"Pygmalion\" and Davies' unawareness that Shaw was a vegetarian when she planned a menu. Generally, however, Saltzman draws on a wealth of motivations and incidents that feel plausible, in contrast to his \"The Tin Pan Alley Rag\" (Pasadena Playhouse, 1997), in which the play's central conceit, a meeting between Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin, felt contrived. Here, the story is framed by a flashback told by Mrs. Shaw from six years later, shortly after Shaw won an Oscar for \"Pygmalion.\" Nicolas Coster's Shaw looks \"like Santa Claus in a famine,\" to quote a Saltzman line. Coster handles Shaw's eagle-eyed retorts and allusions to self-grandeur with dry timing. Mala Powers is equally adroit as the independent-thinking Charlotte. But one brief scene between the couple, in which he sings an Irish song, feels like an unnecessary attempt to soften their relationship.

• Publisher: Los Angeles Times Communications LLC
• Subject: Henning, Daniel / Mr. Shaw Goes to Hollywood / Theater