STAGE REVIEW : Helmond as Sarah Bernhardt: The Legend Doesn’t Translate

What was Sarah Bernhardt like in performance? Ellen Terry provided the best description: “Smoke from a burning paper.”

That is not the impression left by Katherine Helmond in her one-and-a-half woman show, “Sarah in America,” at the Pasadena Playhouse’s Balcony Theatre. (Colette Duval plays Bernhardt’s silent maid.)

Helmond looks, and certainly dresses, the part of the star whom all the best people in New York went to see, but didn’t care to “receive.” The fascination of the Divine Sarah, however, is not felt. And some of the acting, in a show about acting, is very bad indeed.

Helmond is best after intermission, when Sarah is getting old and is starting to need people--as opposed to an entourage. Her humiliation when she realizes that her latest young leading man has someone else to visit after the matinee is nicely concealed. We like her for admitting, with a smile, what a liar she is (the basis of acting, after all). Helmond finds quiet in these scenes, and even a bit of music.

Elsewhere, one is not convinced. Even people who loathed Sarah on the stage acknowledged that this was an actress who knew how to make an effect. (Shaw’s problem with her was that she was all effect.) But Helmond has nothing of Sarah’s intensity in scenes from her big successes: “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” “Phedre” and the like.

It would be folly for Helmond to attempt to evoke Sarah’s grand line in a theater as small as the Balcony. But we do need a sense of the star’s concentration, the magnifying glass that would set the paper to smoldering. And we need a sense of that commanding voice. Playwright Ruth Wolff has Sarah tell us that her secret on the stage was “will power.” We don’t feel it.

The backstage scenes are more comfortable, but they are talked rather than acted. We don’t see the canny Sarah adjusting her strategies as someone new walks into her dressing room--a journalist, a lover, Mr. Shubert. We don’t feel the fur when she pets her tiger. This Sarah is not alive to her fingertips.

The result is a slightly charming visit with a woman who had only one subject: herself. This may have been true of the real Sarah, but she could fool you into thinking otherwise. This Sarah, alas, might have been written by that dreary Mr. Ibsen.

Wolff’s script is fussy, calling for lots of scene changes and light cues. Rather than one long symbolic American tour, ending with Sarah in decline, Woolff takes us through four separate tours (she did nine in all). Too soon we get the picture: Sarah didn’t know when to get off the stage.

Susan Denison Geller’s costumes are the best thing in the show, calculated to turn the women of America Paris-green with envy. Martin Aronstein’s lighting is the second-best thing, especially in its emulation of Sarah’s beloved footlights, very effective as her “youthful” makeup gets more and more garish. Helmond’s director, Annett Wolf, has a good eye. It’s not clear that she has given Helmond much help with her performance.

Plays Tuesdays-Fridays at 8:30 p.m., Saturdays at 5:30 and 9:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 and 7:30. Closes July 2. Tickets $22.50. 39 El Molino Ave., Pasadena. (818) 356-PLAY.

‘SARAH IN AMERICA’

Ruth Wolff’s play, at the Pasadena Playhouse’s Balcony Theatre. Director Annett Wolf. Scenery Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio. Lighting Martin Aronstein. Costumes Susan Denison Geller. Sound Philip G. Allen. Wig and makeup design Victoria Wood. Production stage manager Catherine Cary. Associate producer Eleanor Albano.