MAJOR BARBARA
Roundabout Theater Company at the American Airlines Theater, 227 W. 42nd St., between Seventh and Eighth Aves. (212) 719-1300.
GOD bless Todd Haimes’ Roundabout Theater Company for keeping alive on Broadway some concept of a classic theater!
And God bless it a bit more for Daniel Sullivan’s clean and sturdy staging of George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” with a coolly luminous Cherry Jones, a suavely cunning David Warner and a naughtily witty Dana Ivey.
There are not too many plays by Shaw worth resuscitating.
Luckily, his intricate comedy “Major Barbara” is definitely one of them – muddled in thought, it is clear in wit, incisive in characterization and sparkling in dialogue.
Shaw was a far, far better playwright than thinker.
“Major Barbara” was intended to demonstrate Shaw’s socialist view that “poverty is the greatest of all sins.” Poverty is not a sin but a condition, although society can sin by permitting it.
However, his perverse paradox is nonsense. He suggests that his hero, the bastard arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft, does the world a service because he feeds his workers well and houses them hygienically – even if he’s peddling weapons of mass destruction.
No matter. Many a silver-tongued fool has been a playwright, and Shaw’s concern here is less with his confused political dialectic as with a delightful comedy of manners – a girl-gets-boy story with intriguing diversions on the way.
Barbara Undershaft (Jones) – daughter of Lady Britomart Undershaft (Ivey) and her estranged arms magnate (Warner) – eschews money and class for good works as a major in the Salvation Army in London’s East End at the beginning of the last century.
She falls in love with Adolphus Cusins (Denis O’Hare) a professor of Greek, and goes with him to organize the arms factory for the presumed betterment of mankind.
Despite the essential nonsense of its pseudo-politics, the play can, in the right hands and with the right cast, exert a magical charm, as might be recalled from the peerless 1941 movie version.
Here, Sullivan’s carefully studied and modulated staging, and John Lee Beatty and Jane Greenwood’s stylish designs, let Shaw and his actors shine.
As Barbara, Jones wears her radiant common sense like a banner. Warner, in his U.S. stage debut, plays a silky Machievelli with a handsomely understated yet insidious panache.
All in all, it’s a fine cast. Ivey is riotously funny as Lady Britomart, and, after a slow start, O’Hare warms up splendidly as Adolphus. Zak Orth is pleasantly silly as Barbara’s nincompoop brother.
Shaw can sometimes be the most enormous fun – if not taken too seriously.