On & Off Broadway

‘Noises Off’

Review by Elyse Trevers

Posted

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of a Broadway play? Ever marvel at how performers can get into character and put aside their personal problems? Well, all is revealed in the hysterical revival of Michael Frayn’s comedy Noises Off at the American Airlines Theater.

The play is clever and witty, using wordplay and physical comedy. It’s a three-act play with one intermission, and each act has its own theatrical device. Often the humor is broad, lacking in subtlety. As the play progresses, the comedy gets more outlandish and that’s fine with the audience.

Act I is the dress rehearsal of a play entitled Nothing On. Each performer has his own distinctive quirks, yet none is really a stereotype. Their idiosyncrasies appear throughout the show. Dotty (Andrea Martin) can’t remember her lines. Frederick, whose wife has just left him, suffers nosebleeds when certain words are mentioned, and Brooke, the blonde bombshell (who must be sleeping with someone to have gotten the part,) is just plain awful. An older actor, Selsdon (Daniel Davis) is an alcoholic and totally unreliable. Impatient with the poorly prepared cast, the beleaguered director, played by Campbell Scott, just wants to finish up to get to his next job directing Shakespeare.

Act I has a lot of verbal humor, wordplay and farce with doors opening and closing. Act II and III are more physical with slapstick and falls. There’s no pie in the face but you can almost feel one coming. In Act II the audience watches what’s going on backstage as the play is on the road. Lovers have broken up yet still must work together as tempers and jealousy flare. The characters fight, bicker and flirt yet continue to make their entrances and cues.

The physical humor intensifies in Act III, when now at the end of the run, tempers and bodies are weakening. In some ways, their stage resembles a battlefield but these performers are troopers and the show will go on, even if three actors appear onstage to play the same part.

The ensemble cast is excellent. The show stays true to its British roots with all the performers using English accents. Two standouts in the very fine group are Martin as the ‘dotty” Dotty, playing the housekeeper. She even gets humor out of a plate of sardines (a running joke throughout the play.) Martin over-emotes and milks every move and syllable, keeping the audience in stitches. As the sexy inept actress, Megan Hilty (TV’s Smash) is wonderfully “bad” and awkward, each time she delivers a line. The audience roars when she wriggles down the steps looking for her contact lens. The cast is experienced and talented but, in some cases, sadly underutilized. Rob McClure (Chaplin) and Tracee Chimino (Bad Jews) are terrific comic performers who don’t get to do enough.

The cast makes it so effortless that the audience doesn’t realize how difficult it is to be in the right places and deliver the correct dialogue. They squabble and then, with split-second timing, race to make their cues and always wind up exactly where they should be. Really quite impressive. More importantly, they make us laugh and keep us smiling. In these serious times when guards examine our bags as we enter the theater, it’s nice to be able to escape the grim realities of the world to laugh for two and a half hours.