It’s a blistering summer in 1976 England, and the Webb sisters are headed back to Seaside—an ironic name given you can’t actually see the sea from it.
The Huntington Theatre presents “The Hills of California,” a play written by Jez Butterworth, from Sept. 12 to Oct. 12. After runs on Broadway and the West End, the play comes to Boston in a new production directed by Loretta Greco. The show follows sisters Jillian (Karen Killeen), Ruby (Aimee Doherty), and Gloria (Amanda Kristin Nichols) as they return to their hometown in Blackpool to care for their dying mother.
Four sisters with childhood dreams of becoming a singing group grow up and grow apart after a night that changes their lives forever. 20 years later, three of them return to their childhood home, waiting to see if the fourth sister will show up. While there, forgotten memories and the womens’ shared past bubble up into confrontations, leading to encounters with those long separated, and eventually, a deep-seated healing among the sisters.
Though it’s technically a straight play, music is as central to the plot as it would be in any Broadway musical. Around five songs are sung during the show by the sisters, along with references to the 1950s music scene and major artists like Nat King Cole and Perry Como. The title itself appears as a song within the play, a cheery 40s era quartet number speaking of the wonders of American life.
“The Hills of California” also represents girls’ fantasy of a life of fame and stardom. Those hills shimmer like a far-off dream of what life could have been if the four girls had persevered through the challenges of the road to stardom and become as great as their idols, the Andrews Sisters. Older Joan actually meets two of the members of that group, recounting the story to her sisters in a moment of vulnerability about the truth of her life in California.
While in pursuit of this dream, the girls’ mother sought out an American agent in hopes of getting her daughters on larger stages. Things take a dark turn when he singles Joan out and takes advantage of herwhile her mother looks on. Soon after, Joan is sent away to America with little explanation. Her three sisters end up with different understandings of what happened.
One’s recollection of the past is never fully certain in real life, and neither is it in the show. Even by the end, there are still conflicting ideas about how major events occurred. The story looks very different from Gloria’s perspective than from Joan’s. The issues in the play aren’t tied up neatly with a bow, but instead left frayed and complicated, allowing the audience to draw some of their own conclusions as to why characters acted the way they did.
This uncertainty isn’t a fault of the script—it’s realistic, since each family member has their own view of certain situations depending on how those moments affected them. This highlights the distinctions between each sister’s character, and their respective reactions to grief, humor, and old faces appearing after decades.
From raucous comedy to deeply serious beats, the show oscillates between moods in a way that depicts bereavement in all of its forms. The plot exposes the casual exploitation of women in the entertainment industry, but is also a heartwarming portrayal of the beauty of sisterhood in both childhood and adulthood.
The set design physically shows this division between the girls’ past and present. A turntable allows the entire set to revolve and reveal another side of the house where the 1950s scenes take place. Younger versions of the four sisters appear in their scenes in the past as well as the present, flitting in and out of scenes where their older counterparts see and react to their younger selves.
When older Joan finally arrives mid-Act 2, she has lost her British accent, and is unrecognizable, dressed in the brightly colored and fringed get-up of California’s 70s hippie style. This Joan cannot even bear to see or speak to her mother. In one scene, for example, she ascends the stairs to her mother’s room, only to be confronted by her younger self coming down the stairs. The two versions of Joan seem to acknowledge each other before older Joan goes back down the stairs to rejoin the rest of her sisters, and eventually, sing with them again.
At the end of the show, as their mother dies in her room upstairs, the girls sing a quartet rendition of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” marking the first time they have sung together since Joan left for America. Joan’s younger self returns to the stage as her older counterpart leaves, the switch suggesting that her three sisters recognize that she can never go back to who she was. They have made their peace with each other and with their mother in her final moments. The ending returns to the crux of the play–music–showing that despite how it tore the sisters apart, in the end, music brought them back together.
