Girls on Wheels out on the town for an afternoon of nonsensical, slapstick comedy (photo by Vicki Baker)
Vicki Baker
There’s just something so right about something designed to go so wrong! It sounds crazy, but we never expected a play that had so many mishaps and unfortunate events to be so gut-busting hilarious! What kind of craziness are we talking about? The Play That Goes Wrong, the award-winning Broadway smash-hit farce, part Monty Python, part Sherlock Holmes. Girls on Wheels (Lois Reinhart, Susan Hebert, Vicki Baker, Cassie Richardson, Nancy Burns, and Shirley Monge) attended the production at Denton’s Campus Theater, and we’re still talking (and laughing) about it!
We knew before we went that we were about to watch a “play within a play.” The show takes place on opening night of The Murder at Haversham Manor. In essence, the audience (that’s us) is watching a murder mystery played out on stage. However, the real life actors are portraying actors in these acting roles. Confused yet?
Okay, let us explain. We all know the classic whodunit story—a murder’s been committed at a country manor, and an inspector is assigned to uncover the culprit and solve the case. However, when the plot is given to the accident-prone thespians at the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, things quickly go from bad to utterly disastrous.
It starts off punch-drunk and just keeps getting drunker as one mishap follows another—doors sticking, props falling from walls, floors collapsing, cast members misplacing props, forgetting lines, missing cues, breaking character, mispronouncing words, stepping on fingers, getting locked in a grandfather clock, and a corpse who can’t stay dead. Nevertheless, the bungling actors and crew battle against all odds to make it through to their final curtain call with near collapse of the entire set. Do we ever find out who murdered Charles Haversham? Well … we won’t tell.
The Play That Goes Wrong was packed full of expected and unexpected surprises, all the way to the very end. It was a silly, brilliant, and ridiculously entertaining production, leaving us aching with laughter. It was the perfect way to spend an afternoon with girlfriends and helped take our minds off the craziness that comes this time of the year. Girls on Wheels certainly agreed—everything that goes wrong, was just right!