TAKE TWO

"The Hills of California" and "Yellow Face" come to Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

The setting for “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s often comic, secretly heartsick drama, now at the Broadhurst, is an unfashionable guesthouse in the seaside resort town of Blackpool, in the North of England. Do not go in expecting a hill, or the sunny American West: the title comes from a Johnny Mercer song, which we hear during the play, in assorted wistful strains. (“The hills of California are somethin’ to see / the sun will kinda warm ya—” the song promises ambivalently.) The astonishing Laura Donnelly, who starred in Butterworth’s Tony Award-winning tragedy, “The Ferryman,” plays the guesthouse’s owner, Veronica Webb, a martinet we meet issuing orders to her four teen-age daughters in the nineteen-fifties. Veronica is a mum on a mission: she’s determined to launch her daughters as a closeharmony act, a note-for-note imitation of the Andrews Sisters—a reference that she doesn’t realize may be sliding out of date.

Butterworth does not disguise that “Hills” echoes Arthur Laurents’s musical “Gypsy”—in “Hills,” the hardcharging stage mother’s favorite and most gifted child is fifteen-year-old Joan (Lara McDonnell), just a vowel shift away from June, one of the child-actor siblings in “Gypsy.” But Butterworth, among our most sophisticated structuralists, also builds a complicated temporal armature for the familiar tale of a deluded, fame-hungry stage mother. We see the characters in two eras, played by two groups of actors: in 1955, as tapdancing, ditty-crooning adolescents, and in 1976, as adults, when they come home to Blackpool to see their mother on her deathbed.