The ‘Hills of California’ Challenge

A sheepish confession: I often have a tough time understanding heavy British accents onstage.  The polished, generically English “BBC accent” — no problem. But rapid-fire dialogue in the working-class regional accents of Yorkshire, the Midlands, Scotland — I am surely not the only American theatergoer with decent hearing who has trouble deciphering it from my mid-orchestra seat in a big Broadway theater. 

You’ll never hear a theater critic admit this, of course, for two simple reasons.  One, it is against the tribe’s unspoken code to admit to not understanding anything in a work you’re called on to appraise.  And two (the secret weapon that gives theater critics an advantage over ordinary theatergoers), you almost always get a copy of the script to refer to afterwards.  

I bring up this mundane matter because it helps explain my reaction to The Hills of California, the enjoyable, often moving, if somewhat overwrought new Jez Butterworth play, which has just opened on Broadway after a successful London run. 

The setting is a family-run guest house in the seaside town of Blackpool, in two different time periods. We open in 1976, as three sisters are gathering to attend to their mother, the inn’s longtime proprietor, who is dying unseen in a room upstairs. The animating question is whether a fourth sister, Joan — who left for America 20 years earlier and has been estranged from the family ever since —  will show up as well.

In a series of flashbacks to the 1950s, we learn the backstory. Veronica, the steely matriarch, was a hard-driving stage mother who drilled her four daughters relentlessly to polish a singing act modeled on the World War II trio the Andrews Sisters. Eventually we get to the traumatic event that led to Joan’s departure for a music career in California, leaving her sisters with varying degrees of regret, resentment, and anger.  

Butterworth has won wide acclaim for epic-sized, Tony-winning dramas like Jerusalem and The Ferryman (though I actually prefer his more modest early black comedy Mojo), and The Hills of California shares some of those plays’ virtues and faults. It is talky, overlong, and a little overstuffed with characters. Yet it also displays Butterworth’s knack for regional detail and a sure hand in building his narrative to a satisfying climax, one that illustrates (if a little too baldly) the perils of sibling rivalry and unbridled mother love.  

Ironically, for a play that initially struck me as too “British,” The Hills of California is steeped in American pop culture. We get sprightly renditions of pop standards (not just Andrews Sisters hits, but Johnny Mercer and Richard Rogers too); the climactic scene involves the girls’ audition for a visiting American talent scout for Perry Como’s TV show; and when wayward sister Joan shows up, inevitably, in the final act, she turns out to be a rather cliched embodiment of a ‘70s West Coast rocker gone to seed.  

Reading the script afterwards both helps and hurts. It clears up the murky dialogue and helps sort out the characters, but also reveals some rather obvious foreshadowing in the first act, and haavy-handed exposition to tie up loose ends in the final one. Fortunately, most of this is well disguised by Sam Mendes’s fluid, evocative direction — his staging of the crucial audition scene is riveting — along with the superb cast, most of them imported from the original London production. 

Subtitles would help. But don’t tell anyone I said so.