STAGE REVIEW
Comedy pleasing to eye but little else
By Joe Rozmiarek
Special to The Advertiser
Director Ron Bright has a passionate following for his school productions and big Broadway musicals, but the opening-night audience for his staging of "Noises Off" was small and lukewarm.
Photo by Brad Goda
It could be that Michael Frayn's farce about a mediocre theater company staging a bedroom comedy where everything goes awry is just too British. Or maybe the necessary timing for this door-slamming, pants-dropping foolishness was a split-second off.
From left, Anne Marie MacPherson, Derek Calibre and Ghislaine Sopher-Phillips are part of the ensemble cast of "Noises Off."
Possibly, audiences simply tire out.
Frayn's set-up is intriguing enough: The leading man and the character actress are having a rocky affair. The director is romantically juggling both his stage manager and his self-absorbed leading lady. There's an old boozer in a bit part and a couple of desperately second-rate professional players.
Act 1 is a stop-and-start dress rehearsal that demonstrates individual quirks and collective incompetence.
Act 2 takes place at a matinee performance, six weeks into the run, but turns the set around to let us see the backstage action that almost cripples the on-stage performance.
'Noises off'
Act 3 is a disastrous closing-night, once again from the audience prospective, as the cast effectively disintegrates.
The set by Lloyd S. Riford III is solid-looking and interesting in a woody, two-story English manor house style — and it revolves.
The huge heap of lumber is set on casters that allow it to completely reverse during the first intermission.
This makes for a tantalizing Act 2 opening, letting us see the action repeated from the rear of the stage. But when we see it again from the front in Act 3, the surprise is missing, and so, too, is much of the fun.
Brent Yoshikami plays the leading man with all the quirky hesitation and gulping pauses that we have come to expect. Clara Ann Chorley's character is on stage a great deal of the time, but spends most of it fumbling with a wayward contact lens — in her underwear.
As the husband-and-wife team, Derek Calibre's best moments arise when his pants fall down around his ankles, and Anne Marie MacPherson emotes with flamboyant desperation.
David Schaeffer does a set-piece aging drunk, but stumbles in and out of the action without seeming to take part in it. Ghislaine Sopher-Phillips loses her battle with a difficult accent as the maid, and never seems to be a convincing love interest for Yoshikami's leading man.
The backstage talent of director (Patrick Torres), stage manager (Kayce Erwin) and carpenter (Jeff Muse) mostly speak lines.
Despite its visual interest, "Noises Off" turns out to be something that simply goes bump in the night.
