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There are several junctures in Oh What a Lovely War, the marathon musical being revived by Kansas City Actors Theatre and UMKC Theatre at the National World War I Museum, when it is a little hard to follow what is going on, and when it seems doubtful that the next scene—likely again to end with the rattling of machine gun fire and the players heaped in a pile—will provide any more dramatic progression or resolution than the last. In that sense, the show does a fine job mirroring the futility of the war that it mocks with enjoyable gusto. As truly provocative theatre, however, it never quite secures its own strategic objectives.

First staged in London in 1963, Oh What a Lovely War repackages the tragedy of World War I as a bawdy music-hall attraction, complete with a snarky emcee in bowler, bow-tie, and tails (KCAT’s Phil Fiorini, energetic to a fault), and more than a dozen Pierrots, clowns of the commedia dell’arte school, to play all the parts. A live six-piece ensemble provided accompaniment for syrupy songs from the era (some of which, like “Keep the Home Fires Burning” and “Pack Up Your Troubles,” sounded vaguely familiar to a twenty-first-century audience).

Harsh images of war and propaganda posters were projected onto the backdrop, while mounting casualty counts scrolled across a news ticker above the stage—“British Losses 30,000 Men… Gain Nil”—all providing a contrast with the comedic “war games” from the daily life of the common soldier, from whose perspective this spectacle clearly unfolded. The crowned heads of Europe and their appointed officers were portrayed as contemptuous buffoons who, directing the war from the back, were completely out of touch with life on the front.

One of Fiorini’s finest scenes came when he took on the role of a marble-mouthed drill sergeant attempting to train his recruits in the fine art of bayonet combat; the results were Sid Caesaresque. In the darker second act, John Rensenhouse, another veteran of KCAT, takes over as Sir Douglas Haig, controversial commander of the British Expeditionary Forces who treated the war as a numbers game, deeming casualty rates as high as 60,000 in one day to be unfortunate but acceptable: “It’s simple. Our population is greater than theirs, and their losses are greater than ours.”

The pack of Pierrots is populated almost entirely by MFA candidates of UMKC’s theatre program. Their enthusiasm, commitment, and (in most cases) talent was evident. But the performances were not even, and at times, the show seemed a bit like a student showcase: everyone got a solo. Everyone should not have.

Director Barry Kyle’s staging, which made use of the entire, nearly full house of the Museum’s J.C. Nichols Auditorium, gave the audience plenty of action on which to feast, though a few choices raised questions. For example, a mix of strong, often over-the-top accents—British, Irish, French, German, Swiss, and even Serbian and Belgian—occasionally added a touch of authenticity (and humor, such as in a highly enjoyable scene where the British and French generals attempt to communicate with one another), but more often distracted, and served to make the characters seem too, well, foreign. I found myself wondering how much more powerful some of the moments might have been had the cast delivered their lines clearly in the audience’s own dialect, allowing the costumes to denote their characters’ nationalities.

Despite a few compelling scenes from the trenches—Germans and Brits exchanging gifts across the line during the “Christmas truce;” a mud-covered platoon of Irish recruits geting cut off in No Man’s land—the second half quickly grew wearisome, undermining the show’s emotional energy, even if it might have been by design. “Surely, 1917 will bring victory,” an unnamed officer asserted as Act Two dragged on. “Or 1918. Or 1919, 1920, 1950, 2000, 2014! My god—a hundred years?”

The conveyed sense of desperate futility of those caught in the so-called war to end all wars is harder to access knowing that the Great War would, within a couple of decades, be eclipsed in horror and memory by that Greater War—and then by the rest of what would prove to be the most violent century in world history. (But it served as a nice plug for the Museum’s upcoming World War I centennial programming.)

Then, suddenly, it was over, as anti-climactic as a long-planned armistice. And that’s just the way it was. Given the subject matter, a happy ending was never to be expected, but something more satisfying and stirring could have been made of all this war’s waste.

REVIEW:
Kansas City Actors Theatre and UMKC Theatre
Oh What a Lovely War
By Joan Littlewood, Theatre Workshop, and Charles Chilton
Directed by Barry Kyle
Runs February 11 – February 27 (Reviewed Thursday, February 17, 2011)
National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial
100 West 26^th Street, Kansas City, MO 
For tickets call 816-235-6222 or online at www.kcactors.org

Top Photo by Brian Paulette

By Victor Wishna

Senior Editor, Theatre; Theatre and Features Contributor
Victor Wishna is a writer, editor, and author, among other things. A graduate of Stanford University and the New School's creative writing MFA program, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, Humanities, and other major magazines and newspapers. He contributes a weekly real estate feature to the New York Post and his column “Letter from New York” is syndicated nationally.

With photographer Ken Collins, he published In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights (Umbrage Editions, 2006), for which he conducted and edited interviews with 61 prominent stage writers including Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, and many others. The book won a 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal (www.intheircompany.com).

He has always maintained a love for theatre, as a writer, an audience member, and even an actor, appearing in several community and semi-professional productions. As an undergraduate, he studied acting and playwriting with Anna Deavere Smith, in addition to journalism and psychology (and not engineering or medicine).

After nearly 12 years in New York City, Victor recently returned to his hometown with his wife, Annie, also a K.C. native. When not writing for publication or pleasure, Victor is honing his stand-up routine, which he has performed at numerous clubs and special events around New York, the Midwest, and elsewhere. In June 2010, he was named New York’s second-funniest amateur Jewish comedian by The Jewish Week. Seriously.