Folles, Bick and Mandril in Bell, Book and Candle at Long Wharf

Kate McCluggage as she appeared in the recent Long Wharf Theatre production of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play. She magically reappears at the theater in March as the 20th century witch Gillian Holroyd in John Van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Long Wharf Theatre and Hartford Stage have has announced who’s going to be in their co-production of Bell, Book and Candle, which comes to New Haven first, March 7-April 1, and hits Hartford just days later, April 5-29. Should be a comfortable cast. Nearly all of them have worked with director Darko Tresnjak before, one of them on this very same play.

Kate McCluggage, who stars as comely modern Greenwich village sorceress Gillian Holroyd (the role which was an acknowledged inspiration for Elizabeth Montgomery’s Samantha Stevens in the TV series Bewitched), was Violet Bick in Long Wharf’s It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play just a couple of months ago. She played Portia in Tresnjak’s production of The Merchant of Venice for Theatre for a New Audience last spring, opposite F. Murray Abraham as Shylock.

Michael Keyloun, who plays Gillian’s warlock brother Nicky, played the dual role of Dr. Mandril and Gilbert in Tresnjak’s production of City of Angels at the Goodspeed Opera House this past fall.

Ruth Williamson, the reliable character actress who’s been seen in a slew of Broadway revivals and tours, from Guys and Dolls to The Music Man to Little Me to the 2004 La Cage Aux Folles, plays the third magical family member in the play, Aunt Queenie. Williamson was in the memorable Long Wharf Stage II workshop of A.R. Gurney’s Cole Porter-scored musical Let’s Do It at in 1996. She did a Darko Tresnjak-directed revival of The Women at the Old Globe Theater in 2008.

Gregor Paslawsky (also from City of Angels, as well as Polonius in Tresnjak’s 1999 production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and Lenin in Gregory Boyd’s masterful production of another Stoppard play, Travesties, at Long Wharf in 2005) plays Sidney Redlitch, the writerly role played by Ernie Kovacs in the 1958 film version of Bell, Book and Candle.

Robert Eli from the recent Hartford Stage production of The 39 Steps (not to mention the same theater’s 2000 production of Macbeth) plays Shepherd Henderson. I can’t find any evidence that he’s worked with Tresnjak before, which makes him the odd man out in this hip comedy about various sorts of social ostracism.

Tresnjak directed Bell, Book and Candle at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in the fall of 2007, and apparently is basing this production on that one. Tresnjak was the artistic director of the Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival from 2004 to 2009. After Bell, Book and Candle was already announced as part of the 2011-12 seasons at Hartford Stage and Long Wharf, Tresnjak was named the new artistic director of Hartford Stage. The 2011-12 season was already in place when he took over; the 2012-13 season will be the first to bear his imprint as a programmer.

Only one member of the California cast of Bell, Book and Candle is part of this new New Haven/Hartford rendition—Gregor Paslawsky. Another big difference is that the San Diego production was done on an arena stage, though both the Old Globe and the new Hartford Stage/Long Wharf Bell, Book and Candles will have the same scenic designer, Alexander Dodge and the same lighting designer, Matthew Richards. Neither the costume designer, Fabio Toblini, or the sound designer, Lindsay Jones, did the show in San Diego.

Gregor Paslawsky (center) in Darko Tresnjak’s production of Bell, Book and Candle at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2007. Paslawsky’s the only cast member from that production to be in the play when Tresnjak remounts it at Long Wharf and Hartford Stage this spring. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

I’m looking forward to this one. Bell, Book and Candle is one of those well crafted mid-20th century plays which ruled the summer stock circuit for decades. The roles are wide open to interpretation—this is a script where the Shep and Gillian roles could be originated by Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer on Broadway, then done by the much differently styled Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak for the film. There are also interesting subtexts to plumb in a play about witchcraft in a liberal bastion of New York, written in the era of redbaiting and closeted homosexuality. It’s The Crucible of comedy.