So when i first started college I was a theatre major so every now and then I see something like this that makes me miss it. This show looks really funny. I wish I was in New York so I could go see it.
A Madam’s Machinations in a House of Prostitution
One character in “The Shanghai Gesture” gets very drunk. Her name is Poppy, and she’s an attractive, presumably well-brought-up young flapper, the daughter of an Englishman living in China in the 1920s. But when Poppy has a few too many, she staggers across the stage, becomes obnoxiously loud and says things she probably shouldn’t. (“I’m a nymphomaniac!”)
Tina Chen and Sabrina Veroczi in "The Shanghai Gesture."
The Mirror Repertory Company’s production of “The Shanghai Gesture,” directed by Robert Kalfin, has a lot in common with Poppy (Sabrina Veroczi). Sometimes it’s lovely, quiet and slightly mysterious, but too often it gets carried away with itself, goes over the top and generally doesn’t know how to behave.
But then, melodrama is hard to pull off these days. This one, written by John Colton, first opened on Broadway in 1926, and though it was a hit, some considered it too florid even then. (The new adaptation is by Marsha Sheiness.)
The protagonist (Tina Chen) is the self-possessed owner of a fancy Shanghai brothel. It is the Chinese New Year’s Eve, and she’s planning a grand banquet with distinguished foreign guests. They include Sir Guy Charteris (the excellent Larry Pine), for whom she has a life-changing surprise, one she has been planning for 20 years.
Ms. Chen can’t seem to decide how to play the madam — as a smooth operator, a cackling villain or a good woman deeply wronged — so she does all three. Anyone who saw her in her tiny but memorable role as Robert Redford’s girlfriend in the 1975 film “Three Days of the Condor” knows that she can load a single line with layers of meaning. (Face to face with her assassin in “Condor,” she assures him quietly, “I won’t scream.”) But that ability is not visible here.
“The Shanghai Gesture” is so politically incorrect in terms of European-Asian relations that it’s almost comic. What does stand up over the generations are the deep, dark secrets. Audiences unfamiliar with the story may easily guess one, about Sir Guy’s daughter, but the second is a shocker, and the third is a tragic revelation for the main character herself.
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