Sometimes you want really healthy food and sometimes you want ice cream. "Noises Off" is about as far as you can get from intellectuial theater, but that's no reason to skip the season's final production at the Rep.
It's hard to believe the farcial madness of "Noises Off" and the Tony-award winning, very serious drama "Copenhagen" came from the same author, Michael Frayn. But indeed they did, and one wonders if Frayn began with the old advice to writers, "Write about what you know". It's a play about a play, one being rehearsed and shown by a group of notably unsuccessful professional actors, in the minor towns of the United Kingdom. (Weston-super-Mare, anyone?)
A tip of the hat en passant to my late husband, who loved this play and its sheer silliness, especially a line delivered after the opening bit of business about some sardines: "Get the sardines on, get the sardines off. That's farce ,that's theater, that's life." Yes, indeed, a creed to live by. More doors than a French bedroom farce. Pants dropping. Tumbles down a curving staircase. What's not to like?
Not much. The cast manages the slightly daunting chore of being good actors who must act poorly with scarcely a whimper. Their long-suffering director, Fletcher McTaggart, can avoid that challenge but surely is the stand-in for directors across the English-speaking world and beyond as he wrangles these thesps. The ingenues, Rebecca Miller as the stage manager Poppy and Ruth Pferdehirt as Brooke the Dazed, polar opposites, charm, and the mid-life (or perhaps older, but saying so might injure fragile self-images) women Victoria Adams-Zischke as the stalwart Belinda, perhaps the sanest one of the troupe, and Dale Hodges, dotty Dotty, carry on – well, I was going to say as though they had been doing this all their lives, but now that wouldn't do, would it? More of the physical comedy goes to the gents, Andy Prosky and the hormone-stressed John Scherer, as well as our own Joneal Joplin, a burglar of an apparently wondrous past.
Director Edward Stern runs the cast at a breakneck pace for much of the show, quite appropriate for a high-verbal bunch of characters. Therein lies the only rub. Some of the dialogue is so rapid and the accents so persistent, normally a laudable thing, that lines are lost, bouncing off one another or the far reaches of the other side of the audience. But no dialogue is needed, or used, for a considerable stretch of the second act with a whiz-bang routine of physical comedy involving, among other things, a bottle and an ax, that is as carefully choreographed as any fight scene.
But even missing a few lines isn't enough to ruin the fun. Sometimes ice cream is just the thing.
Noises Off
The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
through April 13
130 Edgar Rd., Webster Groves
314-968-4925