Theater: Lyceum Theatre / 149 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Broadway has a brand new British import, and it’s too late to send it back! Winner of the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, The Play That Goes Wrong is a celebration of the best of live theater… and the worst. Welcome to opening night of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s newest production, The Murder at Haversham Manor. This 1920s whodunit has everything you never wanted in a Broadway show – a ramshackle set, a leading lady with a concussion, and a corpse that can’t play dead. It’s a classic mystery… and it’s a mystery how it ever got to Broadway!
Direct from a bafflingly successful run on London’s West End, this sidesplitting show-within-a-show will move you… from your house to the theater and back. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called it “A gut-busting hit!” and we only bribed him a little. If you thought One Man, Two Guvnors was the finest British comedy to ever cross the pond, The Play That Goes Wrong will prove you right. Don’t miss this strictly limited (though likely too long) engagement!
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April 2, 2017: When your world — or, as it often seems these days, the world — is falling apart, there’s perverse comfort in watching things go smash in a safe, contained environment. (And no, the White House doesn’t qualify.) Such is the brutal allure of monster truck jams, videos of toddlers falling off trikes and steel-cage wrestling matches.
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April 2, 2017: Being bad takes a lot of talent and practice — at least when you’re trying to create a knockabout farce about a play gone horribly wrong. It’s an alchemy of turning chaos into crowd-pleasing broad comedy. You may think I’m referring to “Noises Off,” Michael Frayn’s frequently revived farce about a third-rate English acting troupe putting on a third-rate sex romp, which is full of physical activity that must be staged with the precision of ballet.
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April 2, 2017: Ah, the joy of watching theater fail. The looming possibility of malfunction is part of what makes live performance exciting, and disasters remind us of that; the rite requires sacrifice. There is more than schadenfreude involved when we giggle at, say, a YouTube video of a high-school Peter Pan crashing haplessly into the scenery. There is also sympathy—there but for the grace of deus ex machina go we all—and, often, a respect for the efforts of the actors to somehow muddle through. Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong takes this experience to farcical extremes, as six amateur British actors (and two crew members who get pressed into service onstage) try to perform a hackneyed whodunnit amid challenges that escalate from minor mishaps (stuck doors, missed cues) to bona fide medical emergencies and massive structural calamities.
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April 2, 2017: The show must go on — but in the Broadway transfer of West End hit “The Play That Goes Wrong,” forgotten lines, lost props, technical gaffes and rebellious scenery all seem to reply, “Oh no it doesn’t.” This broad, silly and deliciously demented show, about a fictitious amateur theatrical group with great resilience and greater incompetency, is by the Brit trio of Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields in a style that evokes “Fawlty Towers” with nods to Buster Keaton, Carol Burnett and Monty Python. Under the go-for-broke direction of Mark Bell, its high-energy cast is comic gold and manages to sustain, with a never-ending series of diversionary tactics, its one-joke concept.
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April 2, 2017: Like certain sanctified Hollywood creation myths — pretty girl, soda fountain, famous director — the one about going out a chorus girl and coming back a star retains a surefire audience appeal. Something like that has grown up around J.J. Abrams. A backstage encounter at Hamilton leads to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s commission to compose “Jabba Flow” for the bar scene in Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In London, Abrams sees The Play That Goes Wrong, and soon enough, a ramshackle comedy born as a pub frolic is opening on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre with a producing credit to Abrams worth a fortune in publicity.
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