Frank and Rita live in worlds as different as Henry and Eliza’s. She’s an uneducated but endlessly curious hairdresser. He’s a burnout professor wallowing in booze and self-pity. She’s a sassy, gum-clacker blinged-up in leopard and tiger prints — at the same time. He’s a failed poet as stuffy as a taxidermic variation of either animal.
So it’s understandable that the actors playing the only two characters in Willy Russell’s thinking comedy “Educating Rita” would take vastly different approaches to bringing Frank and Rita to life on the Victorian Playhouse stage. Frank, after all, is a snobbish wordsmith, while she talks like, well, Eliza Doolittle.
But Rita Broderick and Wade P. Wood’s performances are so anachronistic, at times it seems as if they aren’t in the same play together.
The British-born Broderick is in her second skin as Rita, as fresh as the wind blowing through the Vic’s basement door. She’s completely natural as an unremarkable, middle-aged woman who’s had a fire ignited within her to learn . . . everything. Frank is being forced to tutor pupils from the community. “Degrees for dishwashers,” he calls them. They both have a lot to learn.
It’s a match made, if not in heaven, then, of course, for the stage.
But though the Vic is the most intimate theater in town — carved, as it is, out of the basement of a northwest Denver home, Wood isn’t going for the same kind of presentational naturalness as Frank. Nor should he.
But speaking throughout in the affected, measured rhythm of verse, Wood would seem more at home in a Shakespearean play than he appears to be here. Where Broderick’s inelegant words flow smoothly, he seems to pause for a beat between every word.
For a play predicated on real connection, Frank must at some point stop talking like a poet and just . . . talk to her. A Variety reviewer once likened the 2½ hour banter in this play to “a duet for cello and flute.” But if it never harmonizes, “It can play like dueling tubas in an oom-pah band.”
Broderick and Wood are far too good for that. They’re a lovely match for this unromantic love story, building from a sparkling chemistry that almost allows you to forgive Frank’s regular outbursts of churlishness and whining. For just as in Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” Rita is teaching Frank to feel alive just as much as he is teaching her poetry. The irony is that her intellectual curiosity far exceeds his own.
Before long, she’s devouring Blake, Forster and Ibsen. Her hunger for knowledge eventually exceeds his ability to feed her, which turns the tale nicely toward the melancholy. He’s plainly in love with her, but for all his wisdom, he offers little for her to fall in love with in return.
Part of Frank’s social ineptness can be explained by his misplaced argument against sentimentality and subjectivity in criticism. His entire life is void of both, which is why he’s turned into a lonely, insufferable and often cruel drunk.
Rita is a wonderful stage (re-)invention. It’s too bad Russell has so thoroughly stacked the deck against Frank. It would take a performance approaching masterful for any actor to engender any audience sympathy for him. Wood needs to lose himself in Frank’s crisis and not always be so present in the room.
The play goes on far too long, extended here by many scene changes that director Rick Bernstein for some reason plays out for stylistic effect when a more brisk approach would be more appreciated by audience hindquarters. The office set is appropriate but crammed — who puts a dartboard where one has to move a chair after every round of throws?
Still, this is a competent presentation. Broderick’s centered and authoritative transformation will live on as its lasting impression.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Educating Rita”
Comedy. Victorian Playhouse, 4201 Hooker St. Written by Willy Russell. Starring Wade Wood and Rita Broderick. Through Feb. 21. 2 hours, 30 minutes. 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays $20-$22. 303-433-4343,
