WEEK'S BEST/Nude with Violin

Nude With Violin takes place in Paris, 1954. The famous artist, Paul Sorodin, has just died. See what happens when his relatives go through his desk drawers and view his private life.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. -  "Nude with Violin," a comedy by Noel Coward opens Sept. 4 at the Little Theatre of Alexandria in Old Town.

The play takes place in Paris, 1954. The famous artist, Paul Sorodin, has just died. See what happens when his relatives go through his desk drawers and view his private life.
 
Forget about the foibles of regular folks. Sorodin is an artist, and it’s not just his canvases that are colorful. The dead have secrets and you will roar with laughter as you learn about each one of them.
 
A light comedy of manners,  the play is Coward's satire on "Modern Art" (and the art world in general) and the value placed on art. Its original London production, opening in 1956, was successful, running for more than a year.
 
In the play, after Sorodin has died, his relatives and hangers-on converge on his studio, hopeful of financial gain, and are stunned to learn from his valet, Sebastien, that Sorodin has left a letter in which he admits that he never painted a picture in his life.
 

The playwright Noel Coward

The paintings of Sorodin’s supposed three major periods turn out to have been executed by a choleric aristocrat, Anya Pavlikov; a jolly barmaid, Cherry-May Waterton; and a Jamaican Seventh Day Adventist,  Obadiah Lewellyn.
 
The play's author, Sir Noël Peirce Coward (1899–1973), playwright and composer, was born in Middlesex, England in 1899, the second in the family of three sons of Arthur Sabin Coward, a clerk, and his wife, Violet Agnes, daughter of Henry Gordon Veitch, captain and surveyor in the Royal Navy.
 
Coward experienced a distinct lack of formal education, marking his first visit to school in Sutton by biting the teacher's arm, "an action which I have never for an instant regretted." The erratic nature of his schooling stemmed mostly from his, and his mother's, pursuit of a stage career, prompted by an early discernment of theatrical and musical talent.
 
Coward's first real dramatic success, The Young Idea (1922), showed the influence both of Broadway and of Shaw in a comic drama which, with its two teenage protagonists, epitomized the new youth culture of the 1920s.
 
One critic once wrote that words were "Coward's ammunition, and they rattled off his tongue like bullets from a machine gun, enunciated in the inimitable tone which he made his own, and yet which was the product of an early attempt to overcome both his mother's deafness and his own susceptibility to lisp."
 
The cast (in alphabetical order) includes Ric Anderson (Colin), Gary Cramer (Clinton), Michael Fisher (Jacob), Elizabeth Keith (Jane), Elizabeth Heir (Pamela), Gayle Grimes (Isobel), John Barclay Burns (Sebastian), Megan Murphy (Anya), Daniel Durgavich (Stotesbury), Elizabeth Replogle (Marie Celeste), Geoffrey Brand (Fabrice), Diane Linton Sams (Cherry May), DeJeannette Horne (Obediah) and Howard Jaffe (George).
 
IF YOU'RE GOING...
Little Theatre of Alexandria
600 Wolfe St., Alexandria, VA 22314
September 4 – 25, 2010
Wednesday – Saturday @ 8pm; Sunday @ 3pm
For tickets, contact Tina Barry, Box Office Manager, 703-683-0496.