Noises Off at The Legacy Theatre Makes the Character Laugh King (5 stars PLUS)
At Noises Off, running now at The Legacy Theatre in Branford, Connecticut, you don’t just laugh at the gags and physical humor. You start to laugh in-between, during the setups, because you know what’s coming. That is a character laugh.
There’s a show within the show. The cast of Noises Off play an acting troupe (a director, six actors, and two stagehands), who put on a play, Nothing On. Through the three acts with intermission, you see the actors first in rehearsals, then backstage during a show performance, and then back on stage late in the show’s run. Will they make the show a success? It doesn’t matter, because Noises Off (and Nothing On) are farces, meaning that a show that is more about antics than anything else. Noises Off won Tony nominations for its 1982 Broadway opening and for both of its Broadway revivals.
In his autobiography, Chuck Jones, the creator of Bugs Bunny, defined comedy as a normal protagonist (like Bugs Bunny) responding to weird characters, and said that in farce there is no such straight man. In a farce, every character is weird, which can cause the story to become untethered, reduced to slapstick. Chuck Jones didn’t like farce, and neither perhaps did the producers of the Noises Off 1992 film adaptation, which turned the director, Lloyd, into the protagonist and straight man.
Instead, the cast of Noises Off at The Legacy Theatre embraced the wildness, a storm with no center, and made it work in a play that is probably the most challenging test of physical comedy ever written. The strong cast, many of whom are well known from film and television, chose exaggerated mannerisms that elevated the comedy and yet somehow were grounded in the characters, which it turned out was essential to the humor, the key that makes Noises Off work so well. It has been called the funniest farce of all time.
For example, James Roday Rodriguez (Lloyd) when he was on stage used a funny accent and generating intimacy with the case (such as coming close in for an aside), to make Lloyd, the play-within-a-play’s director, more likable, despite his angry dialogue. Rodriguez also knew how to slowly come on stage in a way that didn’t cause the audience to interrupt the show by applauding his celebrity. Melanie Martyn (Belinda) played Belinda as a stage queen who loved to play to the audience. Kurt Fuller (Selsdon Mowbray) plays Selsdon, a drunkard who is the show-within-a-show’s most difficult actor, as an innocent, lovable, a messed-up guy who annoys the cast but without any real pain, and that was a strength of the cast as a whole. Although there are betrayals and heartache in the plot, the actors used comedic exaggeration to hint to the audience that all will be well in the end.
The cast also connected the show’s physical humor to character, which on reflection seems to be the hidden strength of Noises Off. Although you might assume that character is irrelevant to a play of silly antics, the opposite is actually true. In the first act, the audience sees the cast rehearse Nothing On, which is itself hilarious with physical comedy. As Lloyd says, it’s all about doors and sardines. The players come in and out of a series of doors, either seeing each other or nearly seeing each other, sometimes on stage, and sometimes off stage. They either take or leave each other’s props, and stumble across each other, in a choreographed dance that goes at lightning speed, but somehow is accessible. It makes sense.
Because it makes sense, we learn. The first act teaches us the play within a play, and teaches us about the characters (the actors performing that inner play). Then it uses that audience knowledge as an extraordinary series of setups in the second and third acts.
The second act takes place backstage, during a show of Nothing On. The actors go on stage as needed, and otherwise wait backstage, where they must keep their voices down so as to not interrupt the show-within-a-show. So they pantomime or speak in hushed tones. Because the audience understands what’s happening, they understand when the backstage antics are suddenly cut short when one or the actors must run to appear on stage. Then the actor returns backstage and the drama continues as if there had been no interruption. At the same time, props get passed around, such as the flowers that Lloyd hopes purchase and give away. In one adorable scene, Selsdon (Kurt Fuller) sees a bottle of whisky being passed around, and joins the line, happily ready to receive it. But of course it gets yanked away, and his chasing the bottle from performer to performer is yet another running gag.
Somehow it all works. It’s the best kind of running gag. The feeling of “oh, this is going to be good” gets us laughing with just a hint of what’s next. We’re laughing at the setups before the next antics even begin. We know what’s coming, but we don’t know what’s coming. We can’t wait to learn what’s coming. When Jamie Gray Hyder (Brooke) puts her palm to one eye, we know that she has lost her contact lenses, and there’s going to be trouble. When Michael Trotter (Freddie) puts a handkerchief to his nose, we know that he’s gotten a nosebleed, and there’s going to be trouble. It draws the audience in, absolutely. One unfortunate woman in the audience even lost her composure and shouted out the next line, and the cast adapted and used it.
The props, the doors, the characters, and even the play-within-a play: we learn it all. The show teaches you what to expect, and then plays with it, in a way that is secretly genius, and enhanced by the choices of the cast.
Then in the third act, with the audience having learned how the play-within-a-play is supposed to go when it works well, they show how it works when there’s a meltdown. Belinda (Melanie Martyn) is so determined to keep the show going that she hilariously uses a mop as a stand-in when one of the other actors deserts her on stage.
Everything happens on multiple levels. The show also makes fun of actors and their need to know their motivation, and at some point, everyone’s pants fall down. It was the funniest stage show I have ever seen in 20 years of reviewing theatre. Jeff Zeitlin, Managing Director of The Legacy Theatre, told me that it was the most that any previous audience had laughed at a show there.
Kudos to the many original touches, the bathmat used as a headpiece, “her 16th birthday”, the pineapple (a nod to the TV show Psych, which James Roday Rodriguez and Kurt Fuller starred in). There are even scenes when the actors go beyond physical comedy on their own or in pairs to a choreographed physical comedy with the entire cast doing some stunt at the same time. Noises Off is like a pack of dogs chasing the mail truck who somehow catch it, decide to drive it, get chased by even more dogs, and soon you have a whole fleet of dogs delivering the mail instead of people. It’s an acrobatics of comedy. Noises Off lives or dies on the strength of its performers, and in this case, it’s a triumph. Great job, cast. You really are the best of the truck driving dog-postal-worker-actor community.
Noises Off runs through October 12. The show is sold out, but next year see Nunsense, The Wizard of Oz, and The Odd Couple at The Legacy Theatre, an intimate and recently renovated theatre near New Haven, Connecticut that is a gem of New England, punching above its weight.
See more at legacytheatrect.org.