By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
With winter in full swing, you can count on local theaters to provide some escape.
The Village Players offer a visit with the “Savannah Sipping Society,” and the BGSU Department of Theatre and Film brings theatergoers further south to a club somewhere in Florida in “The Legend of Georgia McBride.”
Then there’s the Toledo Opera’s venture to the “South Pacific,” a paradise eve in a time of war.
Not to be out done, though, the Toledo Rep offers a trip to Buffalo. Yes, Buffalo, New York. Yes, where a three inches of snow is considered a flurry. But fear not, the weather is not an issue in the Rep’s “Moon over Buffalo.” Everything else, however, goes wrong in this comic love story about itinerant players, ever hopeful for that big break.
‘Moon Over Buffalo’
So beloved is playwright Ken Ludwig for his comedies, that this play is sometimes billed as “Ken Ludwig’s Moon over Buffalo.” That promises laughs will ensue. I wonder how a production of this play by George and Charlotte Hays, the theater couple at the center of “Moon” would come out. Surely, it couldn’t be more riotous than what the Rep whipped up. Well, anyways they aren’t available available, maybe they’re doing “As You Like It” in Fargo at this point.
Still the Rep does very well with Lane Hakel as George and Jill Reinstein as Charlotte and a solid cast of befuddled supporters.
“Moon Over Buffalo” is on stage at the Tenth Street Stage, 16 Tenth St. Toledo. Showtimes are tonight, Saturday, Feb. 15, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 16, at 2:30 p.m. continuing Feb. 20-22 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 23 at 2:30 p.m. Click for tickets.
Now if you doubt this is a love story you need only wait for the first scene when George and Charlotte burst into the green room, fencing while still in costume from the just concluded staging of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Their passion for each other is evident in their boisterous jousting, as they bound about and on the sofa, oblivious to Howard (Renley Nutter), their daughter’s fiancé whom they have yet to meet, sitting on the sofa then dodging for cover.
This being 1953, the Hays were movie stars of some import. Howard, a TV weatherman, is a fan and is excited to meet them. That encounter proves surprisingly difficult to arrange as does everything else in this play.
The Hayses are in Buffalo doing repertory theater, alternating shows of “Cyrano de Bergerac and Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.”
The troupe is not doing well. The cast has not been paid.
“I have sunk to new depths of hackdom,” George declares. It’s as if he cannot free himself the melodrama of all those characters he’s played.
For her part Charlotte suspects George of sleeping with the ingenue Eileen (Hali Malecki).
We encounter them an auspicious day. George and Charlotte are aware that back in Hollywood, Frank Capra is just starting to shoot his newest film “The Twilight of the Scarlet Pimpernel.” Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, the Hayes’ rivals, are in the leading parts which the Hayes had auditioned for.
Their daughter Rosalind (Nicole Tuttle-Robb) longs for normalcy as a break with the manic show business life her family leads. Having broken it off with long time boyfriend Paul (Kevin Caudill), she is bringing her new fiancé Howard to meet her family. This includes Charlotte’s mother Ethel (Jennifer Dorrell), an impatient and hard of hearing old woman, who meets her son-in-law’s taunts with wit. And Paul has returned to the company to assist George.
Then news blows in from Hollywood that an accident on the movie set has sidelined Coleman and incidentally, Garson. Now Frank Capra is headed to Buffalo to see their play with an eye toward casting them.
This being a Ken Ludwig comedy, this message gets lost in the revelation that Eileen is indeed pregnant, and Charlotte plans to run off with the attorney Richard (Andrew Alfred).
Identities are mistaken. Lines are mangled. Much whiskey is drunk. Many doors are opened and slammed, and Cyrano’s fake nose ends up in odd places.
Ludwig is a master at this sort of comic chaos. He sets up his jokes scenes, if not an act ahead. Howard seems to exist as the straight man for much of this. When Howard announces he’s bought an old Army costume George wore in a war movie, complete with the sidearm, we know as per Chekov, that gun will go off.
Howard sometimes forgets his name when under stress, and that will fuel more confusing.
And watch for the nose, which disappears in Howard’s pocket early on.
Then there are the doors — an inordinate number of them, five in all. The cast is constantly entering and exiting the four that seem to go somewhere. Ludwig waits to put the fifth, a closet door, into play. It’s a credit to the comic skills of the cast that at Thursday’s dress rehearsal, that door fell off its hinges. Rehearsal or no, Caudill and Hakel just kept going, making their wrangling of the loose door part of the act.
Hakel, of course, is known for his comedic abilities, and “Moon Over Buffalo” wonderfully showcases that with its dramatic mood swings and inebriation. The man’s face is rubber.
Both Reinstein and Dorrell are wonderful in bouncing off his wit, and Tuttle-Robb really does seem to be improvising in the climatic scene where Rosalind must deal with her drunken father on stage.
All this makes taking a trip to Buffalo, or Toledo, a worthwhile winter adventure.
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(Photo by Grand Lubell Photography)
‘South Pacific’
Wednesday’s ice storm kept us from attending the dress for “South Pacific,” still the folks at the Toledo Opera were kind enough to find seats for two for Friday’s opening night show. The Valentine was packed. James Norman*, Toledo Opera’s general director and director of the musical, said this was the largest audience since before the pandemic, and that, as of curtain time Friday, fewer than 20 seats remained for Sunday’s 2 p.m. matinee. (Visit toledoopera.org for ticket availability.)
Making wonderful use of a few set pieces and projections, the musical drops our winter weather weary souls in the middle of a tropical island where the French plantation owner Emile de Becque’s children played by Mia Snyder and Nico Perez de Tagle cavort and sing a song in French. They scoot off before their father (Keith Phares) arrives with his guest, the Navy nurse Ensign Nellie Forbush (Claire Leyden). Clearly he’s wooing her, and she’s not discouraging him. Each has their song.
Nellie sings about being “A Cockeyed Optimist” from Little Rock and Emile recounts how on “Some Enchanted Evening” two people can meet. This is a double helping of provisional love songs, those pieces in classic musicals where the two lovers telegraph their future romance.
This takes part on a hillside on an island occupied by the U.S. Navy represented by Seabees, all enlisted men, and the by-the-book officers (Phil Skeldon and Kurt Elfering).
Luther Billis (Robbie Raso) is the Seabees’ ring leader, always looking for an angle to make a little extra money and maybe a little feminine action, as are all his fellow Seabees.
This comes out in “There Is Nothin’ like a Dame.”
A musical would be nothing if guy and dame didn’t hook up. In addition to Emile and Nellie, the musical features another couple Marine Lt. Joe Cable (Mike Schwitter) and Liat (Sarah Rachel Bacani), the daughter of Bloody Mary (Kamryn Loy), an entrepreneurial Tonkinese woman, who relishes having the Americans around so she can sell them souvenirs.
But both romantic couples are troubled by the prejudices the Americans carried with them from home. Nellie breaks off hers because Emile has mixed-race children by his first wife a Polynesian woman, and Cable can’t imagine bringing Liat home as his wife to his upper-crust family in Philadelphia.
He and Emile hash out the roots of bigotry in “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”
As familiar as this show is it’s wonderful to see it live on stage. There’s a vigor to the performance that belies its age — “South Pacific” made its debut 75 years ago. As opera companies reach out for new audiences and community theater turn their gazes to more contemporary fare, these shows from the classic era of American musicals will more and more take their places along side the work of Puccini, Bizet, Gounod, and other classical composers.
As Toledo Opera’s “South Pacific” demonstrates, they will be in good hands.
*James Norman’s first name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
