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Roaming wide-open skies with no commanding officer -- it was the perfect combat job for a congenital misfit, and William Avery "Billy" Bishop, the most celebrated Allied fighter pilot of World War I, certainly fills the bill. The story of how Bishop -- a liar and cheat facing expulsion from the Royal Military College of Canada -- found his true calling inspired "Billy Bishop Goes to War," John Gray and Eric Peterson's two-performer biographical drama with songs.
This perennial favorite on the revival circuit receives an elegantly simple staging by David Rose for Burbank's Colony Theatre Company. Larry Cedar's engaging narration in the title role vividly sweeps us up in Billy's wartime exploits, at the same time poignantly framing the conflicted morality they embody -- though the play stops short of any deeper conclusions or ultimate resolution.
In a graceful, unobtrusive supporting performance, Jeffrey Rockwell provides piano accompaniment, vocal harmonies, sound effects and occasional dialogue.
Billy's mostly upbeat, often comical reminiscences are punctuated by the harrowing realities of warfare in 1914. To escape his miserable assignment in a British desert cavalry unit, he applied to the Royal Flying Corps. The only downside was the average life expectancy of a new pilot: 11 days.
Cedar's Billy peppers his anecdotes with the voices of 17 peripheral characters (male and female, with varying success, though his boa-draped French chanteuse is most amusing). Blessed with the right combination of recklessness, accuracy and luck, Billy finds in the air the clarity of purpose that eluded him on the ground. "In the crucible of battle I grew from youth to manhood," he explains, but that maturation came at a terrible cost of human life, among both his friends and enemies. And Billy's giddy enthusiasm bears some complicity in the carnage.
Cedar and Rockwell address this with a particularly effective rueful spin on the recurring musical refrain "Somehow it didn't seem like war at all," but that's about as much inward reflection as we get.
-- Philip Brandes
"Billy Bishop Goes to War," Colony Theatre, 555 N. 3rd St., Burbank. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; call for additional performances. Ends July 16....