The West End is to London what Broadway is to New York. When an off West End play makes it to the hallowed ground of the West End, it is an event worth celebrating by the cast and also by those who are remotely connected with the production. To see the play from one of the choice seats in the ‘pit’ of an old turn-of-the-last century theater is an ultimate experience for theatergoers in London.
Neil Simon re-wrote the feminine version of his classic comedy The Odd Couple and renamed it the Female Odd Couple. After playing to capacity crowds in Windsor, England the play made its West End debut at the Apollo Theater on April 23. While we are not regular theatergoer, my wife and I could not pass a personal invitation by the managing director Bill Kenwright whom I had not known before and the lead male actor Qarie Marshall whom I have known rather intimately and have followed his theatrical carrier with keen interest.
In the female version of the Odd Couple two women, Olive and Florence, replace the annoyingly sloppy Oscar and his fastidious neat freak apartment mate Felix. The poker game gives way to the Trivial Pursuit that the two women play with their four wisecracking women friends. Together the six brassy broads dish out a sassy New York wit that keeps the play lively. The neat- freak Florence takes the audience on a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows, peppered with slices of one-liner Americana that is at once hilarious, sad and endearing.
The best however comes in the second half when the only two male characters of the show, in a reversal of the Pigeon Sisters of the original version, make their entrance. Manolo and Jesus are two Spanish-speaking brothers who live upstairs from Olive and Florence and come down for a dinner date with them. What follows is a rib roaring comedy based on linguistic misunderstanding and cultural differences between the hosts and their guests. The brothers, played by Qarie Marshall and Vincent Carmichael, are handsome, extremely funny and in full control of their wits and their Spanish accents.
If the audience loved the performance of the two solitary male characters in the play, so did the press. The Daily Telegraph called their performance tour de force of comic acting. The Daily Express said they were so wickedly good they brought the house down.
The most glowing compliment however, came from Lynne Truss, the hard-nosed drama critic of the Daily Mail, who while giving a nodding approval to the play, lavished her praise on the two men who according to her ‘stole the show’.
Now I don’t know much about Vincent Carmichael but I have followed the carrier of the hometown Toledo boy Qarie Marshall for a long time. He came to Toledo from Detroit via Pakistan. He attended Maumee Valley Country Day School and later studied drama at the Bowling Green State University and the University of Toledo. In 1994 he followed his heart and his dream to London when he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, an institution also attended by Pakistani actor and writer Zia Moheyuudin in the early fifties. Qarie studied at that venerable institution for three years only to come out to a life of uncertainty and hardship that is the lot of many an aspiring young actor. Work was sporadic and sparse and remuneration so meager that there was always a lot of month left at the end of the money. The gap was filled by working the London tube stations as a musician and by doing menial labor and odd jobs.
But patience and tenacity of purpose paid off. A stage engagement in Bristol led to performance at the Royal Festival in Edinburgh. Along the way came television work for the BBC and a recently concluded WW II pilot that is scheduled to air this fall on CBS.
Such small incremental successes make any parent’s heart glow with pride and if I may be excused a rare public expression of parental pride, it does mine too.
When off the theater stage, Qarie Marshall goes by the name of Qarie Hussain.