Under the observant direction of Alice Jankell, the cast delivers the distinct personalities and accents, dry wit and despair of their characters, as well as the hallmarks of the period in their comportment. Despite the dated stereotypes of women who can’t get along with each other and can only find happiness and contentment when they’re in the good graces of a man, the story leaves us with a feel-good message about the power of love, friendship, gratitude, and communication to change people’s lives for the better. The narrative revolves around the transformation of four despondent British women of different ages, backgrounds, and dispositions, who share a month’s lease on a castle in sunny Italy to escape the rain and gloom of post-war London and to remove themselves from the stress of their unfulfilling relationships (as sung in their melancholic refrain “Endless Rain”). Michael Perry (music and lyrics), retitled An Enchanted April, delivers the old-fashioned story in both dialogue and song, in a nostalgic production by Utah Lyric Opera (in association with Thunder Media Group) that evokes the historic style of an operetta (a genre that enjoyed its last hurrah in the 1920s). Now playing a limited engagement at Theatre Row, a new musical adaptation by Elizabeth Hansen (book and lyrics) and C. Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 novel The Enchanted April, set during the devastating aftermath of World War I and a severe epidemic of the influenza that ravaged England at the time, has been the source of several popular stage and screen versions of the past.
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