![]() The play has been running for a month, and the actors are literally at one another's throats. The first half is relatively slow moving, mainly introducing the players and working through the details of "Nothing On." But during intermission, the set is turned around, revealing a shaky wooden structure, smeared with graffiti and otherwise unpainted. Allana Kirk plays a peculiarly likable airhead as actress Brooke Ashton. Suni Chapman turns in a bright, animated comic performance, both as the harried actress Dotty Otley, and as the Cockney maid her character plays in "Nothing On."īruce Alan Rauscher also is fun to watch as actor Garry Lejeune, a prima donna who is carrying on an affair with Dotty. Monks's accent is perfect, too - he is originally from London. Tel Monks plays the troupe's director, Lloyd Dallas, with a flair for conveying his character's sense of sarcasm, desperation and ultimate resignation in response to his plight. The mediocre troupe tries to pull it together after only two weeks of practice. "Noises Off" opens with the last rehearsal of a show called "Nothing On," an obviously bad play, set to open the next day. The memorable tour de force of the show is the main scene change, when the entire set - the backdrop for a bad play the characters are producing - is turned around to reveal the backstage, where the audience sees what happens behind the scenes when the disastrous production is performed.ĭowning and Glikbarg's set is a wonderful, stone-walled English manor house living room, with at least 10 doorways (three are usually good enough to permit the chaotic slam-banging entrances that characterize a good farce). Designed by John Downing and Bill Glikbarg, the Little Theatre's set got several ovations from Saturday's opening weekend crowd. The biggest star in any good production of "Noises Off" often is the set. The well-established Little Theatre of Alexandria has the resources to do it right.ĭirector Eleanor Tapscott has rounded up a talented nine-member cast and coached cast members through the physically crazy performance with uncanny timing. Warning: The Little Theatre of Alexandria's latest production contains violence (a guy gets goosed with a cactus) and partial nudity (another guy spends a whole scene in his boxer shorts hopping around with his pants around his ankles), and it offers no redeeming social value whatsoever (it's a farce).īut "Noises Off," Michael Frayn's 1982 British farce, is among the most clever of them all - a farce within a farce, which makes fun of all the dumb conventions of the genre while shamelessly indulging itself in every last one of them.
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