Weak script leaves farce stretching for laughs
When a farce falls flat, it lands with a particularly loud thud.
That’s what happened in the first act of “Moon Over Buffalo,” the formula backstage farce by Ken Ludwig at Interplayers. Happily, the second act showed more signs of life and finally delivered the goods: a number of solid belly laughs. By the end of the show, the cast had finally settled into stride and had earned a number of cathartic full-bodied laughs, most of them because of inspired bits of physical comedy.
My enduring memory of this show will be of the dead-drunk George Hay (Gary Pierce) being carried by Paul (Dan Anderson) bodily off-stage, in full upright position, with arms and legs flapping like a rag doll.
It is no coincidence that this laugh was unconnected to any of Ludwig’s actual dialogue. Make no mistake, this script is solidly, consistently second-rate. You can tick off every one of the tired farce conventions being trotted out: The sweet-looking grandma with the nasty tongue; the cute young thing who becomes conveniently pregnant; and the boyfriend so nervous he forgets his name, thus leading to a comic mistaken identity.
This wouldn’t have been so glaring if Ludwig’s one-liners hadn’t been so lame, relying far too much on insult humor. George insults grandma Ethel (Alba Jeanne MacConnell) with predictable cracks about the whereabouts of her “broomstick”; Ethel insults George with remarks about his hamminess (they ought to stick “cloves” in him and serve him with pineapple); and George and his wife, Charlotte (Jean Hardie), insult each other almost constantly, except for when they are expressing their undying devotion to each other.
Yes, it’s that kind of comedy. In the first act, the sparse Interplayers crowd was not exactly roaring, which caused the cast to try even harder, mostly by yelling even louder at each other.
However, I will grant that Ludwig at least sets the farce machinery into serviceable motion for the second act. The show is about a second-tier touring stage company in Buffalo. They have reason to believe that Frank Capra will be attending, possibly to make them stars. Yet when the time for the performance comes, things go wrong, terribly wrong. For one thing, George makes his grand entrance as Cyrano, yet the rest of the cast thinks they are doing Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.”
Pierce and Hardie both deliver plenty of good work, especially in their vigorous physical comedy scenes. Kari Mueller and Damon Mentzer make a charming young engaged couple. Robert L. Wamsley, Ryan Marie Patterson, Anderson and MacConnell all contribute nicely to the comic mayhem.
Director Paul Villabrille deserves credit for the success of the show’s physical comedy sequences, which were, thankfully, quite extensive. Yet I am not inclined to let this production entirely off the hook. Overall, the entire show felt under-rehearsed, with too many lines delivered hesitantly and too much dead air between cues. It felt less than fully professional.
Still, a better script would have made me far more inclined to laugh. A farce should be, by definition, a whole lot of silly fun. Take too much fun out if it, though, and all you’re left with is silly.