“The Hills of California” has transferred to Broadway in a vivid production directed by Sam Mendes following a London run, with much of the original English cast of the drama/black comedy intact. “A song is a dream..
.a song is a place to live,” explains Veronica Webb, a determined English single mother and boardinghouse proprietress in an oft-repeated motivational speech to her four young daughters (whom she is training, in a relentless Joe-Jackson style, to become a musical quartet modeled after The Andrews Sisters) in Jez Butterworth’s time-shifting and absorbing three-act show. The play’s title refers to a mid-century song by Johnny Mercer, performed by The Webb Sisters.
It represents the freedom of escaping a seedy English seaside and achieving fame and fortune. It opens in 1976 in the public parlor of the now crumbling Seaview Luxury Guesthouse & Spa (which actually has no views of the sea but does have a broken jukebox and tiki bar), where an unseen Veronica is upstairs dying of stomach cancer and in soaring pain. Jill (Helena Wilson), the eternally scared daughter who never left home and is still single, is soon joined by her bitter and temperamental sisters Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) and Gloria (Leanne Best), who treat their husbands with condescension and harbor resentment and jealousy of Joan (Laura Donnelly), the eldest sister, who years earlier escaped to the U.
S., cut a record, and has not been seen since. (As it turns out, Joan, who eventually shows up,.