Review: Georgia Ensemble’s efforts to entertain with “Vanity Fair” mainly in vain

Vanity Fair aims to hit high class and low comedy in the new production at Georgia Ensemble Theatre. It misses both targets.

For example, there is a scene where flatulence drowns out aristocratic dialogue. When heroine Becky Sharp steps upon one rung of the social ladder for wealth and social status in Regency England, she manages to charm Matilda Crawley, a rich old woman with a severe gas problem. And, just in case Mark Pitt, the scruffy-faced actor wrapped in a shawl onstage as Matilda, isn’t flailing enough to suggest bowel distress, Georgia Ensemble Theatre plays the flatulence out over the loudspeaker. No mere whoopie cushion will do.

Sometimes, theater is about people putting on pretty costumes, talking in accents and telling mostly polite, silly versions of classic novels for comfortable audiences. It’s theater for your aunt. She can drag her husband to the show, get herself some culture and a nice love story, and maybe he’ll even stay awake. It’s easier to see a show than it is to read 67 chapters of an old novel by William Makepeace Thackeray.

The 2017 script adaptation by Kate Hamill, presented as a “play within a play” in a circus tent, even has a narrator onstage to acknowledge that some of the husbands have probably been brought to the show against their will. Occasionally, the script is a bit wicked and challenging, yet this production, at Roswell Cultural Arts Center through March 6, shoots to be cozy and silly. 

These kinds of plays are all drawing-room antics, British accents and nice young ladies playing pianoforte while wearing pretty gloves, bonnets and Empire waist gowns. It’s mansions and manners. And it’s fine to stage Masterpiece Theatre-type shows. It’s just fine.

When staged with energy, classic adaptations can be a blast. With this staging of Vanity Fair, it’s a mixed bag, for the actors are occasionally directed to ape instead of emote. It needs more humanity and clarity. Instead, it reaches broadly for romance, broadly for comedy. It wants to be classy and tacky. Instead it’s unfocused and the center does not hold.

There is a built-in book club audience for these shows, and these handsome productions allow theaters like Georgia Ensemble to take risks with original productions and new playwrights elsewhere during their seasons (such as The Pretty Pants Bandit, opening here in late March). The right adaptation of a tried-and-true classic book will even let producers hire a handful of capable actors to play 20 characters with costume quick changes, as it happens here and did with Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery at Theatrical Outfit last November.

A downside is, this is the sort of theater that people who dismiss theater outright think that all theater is. 

Based upon which of their multiple roles they are playing, the ensemble players bluster, gesture and exclaim lines to the back row in the broadest, most affected manner possible. It feels like they’re shouting at the audience. Sometimes, given a character who is more sympathetic, an actor will play that part with heart and humanity, which makes the clowning done the rest of the time seem more ridiculous.

Pitt, for instance, plays the sinister narrator, a horrible nobleman and the gaseous old lady, yet the narrator seems to be where the actor prefers to dwell. He’s very good when he’s not required to fake a fart.

With a circus tent backdrop set designed by Isabel and Moriah Curley-Clay, wigs by George Deavours and outfits created by Joanna Schmink, the production is pretty, if emotionally inert.

But the issue with Vanity Fair, directed by Brenna Corner and James Donadio, is that this material is not supposed to be polite. Hence the farting. Staging this script without spark or energy buries the satire and the wit. 

This story is not the same as some Pride and Prejudice variation. The character Becky Sharp is no Lizzie Bennett or even Jane Eyre. Thackeray crafted Becky as a cunning, conniving viper, and readers in 1848 couldn’t believe what she did, eagerly awaiting the next new chump she’d seduce and manipulate in each new installment of the serialized book.

Vanity Fair follows penniless, low-class orphan Becky, played by Christina Leidel, and her noble, decent school friend Amelia Sedley, played by Tatyana Arrington. Becky and Amelia both seek to marry men of means before the Napoleonic Wars break out, but they have entirely different motives. The rich, naive Amelia is lovesick for George Osborne, a man she has loved since childhood whom she mistakenly believes is a good fellow. Becky wants a fortune and status, and she’ll throw herself at any man who might be able to provide it, even if she’s got a husband already.

There’s not much passion and relish in Becky here, though. The parade of side characters rushing in and out make it hard, at first, to determine the relationships and the situation at the beginning, so Leidel doesn’t get to command the attention Becky deserves. Sometimes, the character switches happen so rapidly among the ensemble, the story gets lost.

As Amelia, Arrington is charming. (The actress will play the role through February 27, then be replaced by Chelcy Cutwright for the final week of performances.)

By the second act, the narrative has a bit more focus. The schemes and the violence make the show more compelling. And, at moments, the good and the bad characters get the chance to speak directly to the audience, defending their choices and asking to be judged fairly.

In addition to the production values, this show deserves credit for diverse casting. Tamil Periasamy, at his best playing the scoundrel George, and Roz Sullivan-Lovett, a non-binary performer who effectively transforms into a dandy fop, a noble lady and King George IV,  are inspired choices. Charged with many parts, Robin Bloodworth and Eric Lang do their best work as noble soldiers.

But playing it either too safe or too silly, Vanity Fair lacks much depth.

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Covid-19 protocols: Georgia Ensemble Theatre requires proof of full vaccination or a negative PCR test result administered within 72 hours of the performance or a negative result from a rapid antigen test taken within six hours of the performance. If you do not test before you come to the theater, the theater is selling self-administered Covid tests for $10 at the door, which you can take in a private area (please allow 20 minutes before the start of the performance for this). Masks are required in the theater.

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Benjamin Carr, a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, is an arts journalist and critic who has contributed to ArtsATL since 2019. His plays have been produced at The Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan, as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. His first novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant in 2021.