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| Julia Child (Karen Janes Woditsch) learns the proper way to scramble an egg from master chef Max Bugnard (Terry Hamilton) |
You probably don’t need the sweet, buttery smell of shallots
cooking to know that TimeLine Theatre Company’s production of “To Master the
Art” is the theatrical equivalent of comfort food. It would be nostalgic,
sentimental and absolutely delicious without the onstage cooking.
And while the smell of cooking shallots will have you
salivating, it is the performance of Karen Janes Woditsch as famed chef and
author Julia Child that foodies and fans of good theater will savor.
Woditsch
gives one of the best performances of this season and the show is not to be
missed.
Though essentially a remounting of TimeLine’s 2010 off-Loop
hit (there have been some minor tweaks to the book by William Brown and Doug
Frew), this is anything but a reheated leftovers. Woditsch gives a performance
that has both aged like a fine wine and marinated like a cut of beef. It’s
sumptious, humorous and ultimately uplifting. There is perhaps no greater honor to a master chef who once quipped that
food was “one of the simplest and nicest pleasures.”
The play’s plot doesn’t cover much new ground (most of this
was covered in either Child’s autobiography My
Life in France and/or in the film “Julie & Julia”). Gourmands and fans
of the late chef and author will find all the major highlights of Child’s time
in France are covered here from the development of her sophisticated palate
after a soul and spirit-defining first meal in France (a lunch of oysters, sole
meunière
and , because it is after all France, a bottle of white wine), through her humble
determination to be accepted as an equal and not just some American debutante
at the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
The play also dwells on Child’s
study under master chef Max Bugnard (the superb Terry Hamilton), her fateful
meeting with Simone Beck (Jeannie Affelder, whose Simca gradually warms to both
Child as a person and the nickname of “Simca” that Child bestows on her), the
co-founding with Beck of the cooking school L'école des trois gourmandes, the decade spent writing the groundbreaking
726-page tome “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with her and the struggle
to get the book, which would eventually have an impact on American kitchens
which continues to this very day.
Child’s relationship
to her husband Paul (Craig Spidle) is, of course, tested while she struggles to
get her book published and he is interrogated in Washington D.C. at the height
of McCarthyism. The pair is a little too supportive of each other’s life
choices and endeavors. They rarely argue in the show; this seems more playwrights
Brown and Frew’s idolizing of their subject matter than it does with reality
(every happily married couple I know fights over things big and small).
Other notable
performances include Sam Ashdown as Carolina, a fellow culinary student who
dreams of opening a sophisticated barbecue shack and Janet Ulrich Brooks as
both Child’s cooking school nemesis Madame Dorin and her book-publishing
advocate Avis.
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| Jane (Heidi Kettenring) prepares to say 'au revoir' to the Childs. |
If there is any edge
to the show it is with the character of Jane Foster (Heidi Kettenring). A
friend who served with the Childs in WWII, Foster was famously indicted by a
Federal grand jury for espionage in 1957 (charges she continued to refute until
her death in 1979). A scene set towards the end as the Childs are preparing to
move back to the states has Foster realizing she will never return stateside. It
allows Kettenring to display her formidable acting chops, but it’s the culinary
equivalent of getting a spoonful of aspic when you had been eating fruit salad.
“To Master the Art” runs through Oct. 20 at the Broadway
Playhouse at Water Tower Place, 175 E. Chestnut. Tickets, $24-$75. Call (800)
775-2000.
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