Pocket Sandwich Theater has a sure-fire hit in their production of Ken Ludwig's backstage farce, Moon Over Buffalo, a hilarious send-up of the people who devote their lives to the theater. Premiering on Broadway in October 1995, it starred Philip Bosco and Carol Burnett.
Charlotte Hay (Cindee Mayfield) is a former Broadway star now reduced to playing repertory with her second-rate actor husband, George (Dennis Millegan.) Other members of this tragedy-plagued, near-bankrupt company include their daughter, Rosalind (Samantha Thomson), Charlotte's profoundly hard-of-hearing mother and company wardrobe mistress, Ethel (Cindy Beall), the resident ingenue, Eileen (Ashlie Kirkpatrick), company manager and wannabe actor/director/playwright and Rosalind's recently estranged boyfriend, Paul (Beau Trujillo), Rosalind's new boyfriend, Howard (Andrew Dillon), and the Hays' attorney, Richard (Tony Martin). The company is performing Cyrano de Bergerac and Private Lives in repertory. Of course this provides ample opportunity for an inebriated George to get his roles confused forcing Rosalind, as Sybil Chase, to ad-lib Elyot's lines on an empty stage until George finally makes his entrance - as Cyrano. Samantha Thomson milks this scene for every last laugh.
The play opens in 1953 on the stage of the Erlanger Theater in Buffalo at the rehearsal of Act IV of Cyrano de Bergerac with George as the title. The scene soon shifts to the green room where George and Ethel continue their performances. Enter Rosalind to announce her good news: She is going to marry Howard. Ethel's hearing loss provides the first of many laugh provoking non-sequiturs such as: "Grandma can I get you your hearing aid?" Ethel: "No thank you, dear, I'm not in the mood for lemonade." There are more such exchanges, and Cindy Beall pulls off each one with perfect timing.
Exit Ethel and enter Howard. He is nervous about meeting the family and asks Rosalind if they know, "I'm in show business too?" Howard is a TV weatherman; so Rosalind replies, "They do Shakespeare and Chekhow; you do precipitation." Howard's career provides the opportunity for many very funny double entendres.
Then there are the two major sub-plots: George had a one-night stand with Eileen, and now she is pregnant and Charlotte has found out. The improbable resolution to this dilemma at play's end will have you laughing out loud.
Meanwhile out in Hollywood Frank Capra is making a movie of "The Scarlet Pimpernel." The star, Ronald Colman, has fallen down the stairs and broken both legs and Greer Garson has walked off the set. Capra, at the behest of George's agent, is flying out to Buffalo to catch the Hays' disastrous matinee of Private Lives.
There is an old axiom in the theater that 90 percent of a play's success lies in the casting, and director Rodney Dobbs is batting 1,000 with this dead-on perfect cast. As art imitates life, Mayfield is the real-life wife of Dobbs.
In Moon Over Buffalo, timing is everything as actors bound through doors at break-neck speed making their entrances and exits through numerous doors. Part of this madness includes a side-splitting scene involving George and Paul in the funniest double entendre of the play.
Millegan excels in a tour-de-force of frenetic physical fortitude.
Dobbs not only directed but was also responsible for set design, closely adhering to Ludwig's staging concept as far as the small stage at PST would allow, which is no small feat. Ludwig has borrowed a page from Michael Frayn's Noises Off including the many doors and the numerous mistaken identities.
Moon Over Buffalo is a play you don't want to miss.
