Samuel A. Taylor’s “Sabrina Fair” has been twice adapted for the movies, each time with significant revisions. The new Ford’s Theatre production of the 1953 romantic comedy hews to Taylor’s text but changes the race of the title character, Sabrina Fairchild, and her father, Craig, to black. It’s a shrewd move in that it’s enabled the casting of the sublime Susan Heyward and Craig Wallace, respectively, in those roles, but the gambit doesn’t peel off any previously unsuspected layers of meaning, because the peg on which Taylor’s scenario pivots, then and now, is class. Which is to say: “Sabrina Fair” was a diverting trifle in the Eisenhower era, and the decades have not brought it weight or resonance. That said, director Stephen Rayne presents its escapist pleasures intact.
Sabrina, the adventurous, whip-smart beauty who bewitches both of the wealthy Larrabee brothers, is the daughter of their family’s chauffeur. He’s read 6,328 books on the job, currently enjoying, if not, says he, understanding Lucretius’ “On the Nature of the Universe.” She was a precocious kid when the brothers Larrabee knew her, but when she returns to the family’s Long Island compound — “a place where there are more servants than people” — having blossomed into womanhood after several years in Paris, both the freshly divorced David Larrabee and his more phlegmatic elder brother Linus are smitten.
That’s pretty much it. The stakes are low here. As the enigmatic Linus Jr., the business whiz under whom the family firm has prospered since he succeeded his elderly father at the helm, Todd Gearheart is charismatic and likeable, but betrays no trace of the vulnerability that might make us root for him and Sabrina to recognize their compatibility. Tom Story brings a winning note of insouciance to the role. In fact, the performances are chief among the show’s pleasures: Kimberly Schraf’s no-nonsense Aunt Julia and John Dow’s avuncular turn as the retired elder Linus Larrabee — a man who attends the funerals of strangers just to get himself out of the house — give the piece a warmth it might otherwise lack, given that this is a story about the two smartest rich people in a room full of rich people learning not to stop and smell the roses, but to fly in formation together while they leave everyone else in their dust.
