Full Moon

WCLO takes Ludwig's backstage farce as far as it can go

by Steve Vineberg

MOON OVER BUFFALO By Ken Ludwig. Direction and set

design by Doug Ingalls. Lighting by Michael Casey. With Matt Carr, Bonnie Stockdale, Andrea Ajemian, Robin Gabrielli, Mark Siagh, Harriett Katz, James Bronwell, and Aimee Schiffman. A Worcester County Light Opera production at Rice Hall, through February 14.

If your idea of a champion farce is Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, then you're likely to respond more favorably to the same playwight's Moon Over Buffalo at Worcester County Light Opera than I did. It's not a very good comedy, but it has the kind of hard-sell aggressiveness that passes for hilarity, and the go-for-broke spirit of Doug Ingalls's production is certainly the right approach. There's no doubt that the show, at least in this incarnation, is a crowd pleaser. I didn't see the Broadway production starring Carol Burnett and Philip Bosco, but my instinct tells me that a professional mounting of this threadbare play would seem more desperate than good-hearted, whereas the ebullient unpretentiousness of a community group like WCLO works to the actors' advantage, showing them off, in this material, as high-energy troupers. I admired the hell out of Ingalls and his cast, but they couldn't get me past the obstacle of the script.

Moon Over Buffalo is a backstage farce that owes debts to Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime, Noel Coward's Hay Fever, and Christopher Durang's An Actor's Nightmare -- and the borrowings are so overt that at times you feel you're watching a compendium of comedies about the theater through the ages. The era is the early '50s, and the main characters, George and Charlotte Hay (Matt Carr and Bonnie Stockdale), are a permanently down-at-the-heels theatrical couple who are still performing old-fashioned repertory in Buffalo, New York. They do Cyrano de Bergerac with a cast of five (more than they can afford to pay on a regular basis) and run it in repertory with Private Lives; it never seems to have occurred to Charlotte that -- with a daughter in her twenties -- maybe she's a trifle too old to play Roxanne opposite her husband's Cyrano. (The couple's theatrical narcissism is Ludwig's primary running gag.) The play is set on the morning and afternoon of the day when their daughter Rosalind (Andrea Ajemian), a former member of the ragtaggle troupe, returns home with her fiancé (Mark Siagh) in tow, and the Hays are told that they have a chance at the leads in a new Frank Capra movie -- and that the director himself is planning to show up at the matinee. Much broad-humored confusion ensues, during which -- among other things -- George discovers that he's gotten a supporting player (Aimee Schiffman) pregnant, Charlotte nearly runs off with an old suitor (James Bronwell), George gets irredeemably sloshed, and no one, including the wardrobe mistress (Charlotte's deaf mother, played by Harrriett Katz), is quite sure which play they're supposed to be performing. The troupe, at this point, consists of the Hays, Rosalind (subbing for the distraught pregnant actress), and her old boyfriend Paul (Robin Gabrielli), who still works for her parents.

Some of this is funny, especially the climax, where almost the entire cast ends up on stage in a conglomeration of Noel Coward and Edmond Rostand, and an interlude where Howard, the fiancé, a TV weatherman by profession, recites his spiel for Charlotte, who has fallen into the misperception that he's Frank Capra. Unfortunately, not many ideas in the script are so irresistible. Ludwig is a second-rater with the push of a star comic playwright, and he appears to find his own ideas so funny that you don't always have the urge to laugh along. Furthermore, the first act is badly constructed: the entrances and exits don't rhyme, the way they need to in a farce; sometimes they don't even make dramatic sense. In the WCLO production, the actors fumble somewhat in the first act (at least, they did the night I saw the show), but you can't blame them when the script hurls them about like dolls in the nursery of a bad-tempered child. It's in act two that Ingalls's invention begins to soar and the actors find their footing. Ingalls has a gift for staging physical comedy that was evident in his production of Laughter on the 23rd Floor at Stageloft last fall, and he has the cast barrel through the script, swinging at the jokes in larger and larger arcs. It's a smart idea to think of the second act as a series of toppers; sometimes the pace extracted from actors cantering through a play this mediocre is exhausting, but I can't think of a better directorial choice. It certainly gains him the confidence of the audience.

On the whole, Ingalls's own troupe is fit and resilient, though I found Harriett Katz's turn as the sardonic mother (who engages in a running battle with her son-in-law) over the top, and Andrea Ajemian's depiction of the unsuccessful family rebel Rosalind could use a little more high style. Not everything Matt Carr does as George comes off, but it's a bold comic performance, with much to applaud in it. As his wife, Bonnie Stockdale, in a turn clearly inspired by Bette Midler, is consistently uproarious, and it's cheering to see Mark Siagh, who got stuck with the single dud role in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, show so much comic energy -- as does Robin Gabrielli as his rival, Paul. It's a strong cast, and they rev up Ludwig's play. What they can't do is make you believe you're watching Kaufman and Hart.