Playwright Ken Ludwig is known for writing comedies, farces if you will, stuffed with slapstick, silliness, slamming doors and mistaken identities. To help you laugh, Music Theatre of Connecticut has a juicy situation play fraught with humor all ready for your entertainment. Come brighten your winter gloom by visiting with George and Charlotte Hay, two married thespians who have very different views on how their acting careers should progress. Join them in Buffalo in 1953, as they perform in repertory in two plays, “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Private Lives” in “Moon Over Buffalo” weekends until February 23. These aging actors find their personal dilemmas and marriage views conflict head on with their stage personas. Watch out!
Anna Holbrook’s Charlotte has dreamed for decades of starring in Hollywood, glamorously in the movies, while Rod Brogan’s George is quite content on the stage where live theater is his happy realm performing. When a famous film director Frank Capra suddenly calls George and informs him he is coming to see the couple perform that afternoon, George realizes this is their last best chance to become the stars Charlotte has always desired. Capra has a giant current movie and injury has sidelined the lead. Will George and Charlotte be tapped for the replacements?
Unfortunately back in Buffalo, the Hays have problems of their own. Charlotte has just discovered George has been unfaithful and impregnanted a fellow actress Eileen, Olivia Fenton, their daughter Rosalind, Allie Seibold, has surprised them with a new fiancé Howard, Ted Gibson, when they thought she was going to marry Paul, Matt Mancuso, a member of the theater company. To add to the confusion, Charlotte’s mother Ethel, Jo Anne Parady, is deaf and misunderstands who is whom and the company lawyer Jim Schilling’s Richard fancies himself in love with Charlotte and wants to run away with her. While doors continuously slam, George continues to disappear and get drunk, costumes are exchanged, plays are confused, Frank Capra is temporarily lost and chaos ensues. Clint Hromsco directs this crazy and zany comic confusion that runs wildly off the rails with laughter.
For tickets ($50-60), call MTC, 509 Westport Avenue, Norwalk on route 1 at 203-454-3883 or online at www.musictheatreofct.com. Performances are Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
Come visit the lunatics in the asylum as the theater company struggles to pay its bills, death threats are issued, marriages are in jeopardy, break a leg is no longer a sign of good luck, and you might find yourself overcome with laughter and forgetting your troubles along your merry way.
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