The review is the opinion of managing editor Charmain Z. Brackett
The title says it all — “The Play That Goes Wrong.”
Even before the actors officially took the stage, I heard a cast member tell someone in the audience “if you see a spark, let someone in black know.”
Le Chat Noir brought the Olivier Award-winning play to its black box theater May 20 and 21 for the first of two weekends.
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It’s not your typical Le Chat Noir fare. It’s not the hard-hitting, cutting-edge, avant garde production the black box theater has gained the reputation of producing, but after two years of COVID, a war in the Ukraine, inflation et al., a play that was the complete opposite of that is just what the audience needed, Krys Bailey told me a couple of weeks ago.
And “The Play That Goes Wrong” fills that need for comedic relief with masterful results.
A play within a play, the original storyline is that it’s about a theater company in the midst of financial woes; for Le Chat Noir, that’s been tweaked slightly to be about a theater company coming out of COVID, which brought with it its own set of budgetary woes.
Krys Bailey, Le Chat Noir’s executive director, welcomed the audience as the director of Le Chat thanking people for returning and mentioning the newly opened Les Hydropathes bar, but he quickly slipped into the role of the theater director who would be playing the character of Inspector Carter who has been called upon to solve “The Murder of Haversham Manor.” Cue dramatic music and stage lighting.
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And everything that can go wrong in live theater does, from needing a last-minute understudy to set and prop malfunctions to overacting bad actors.
The cast of “The Play That Goes Wrong” made it look easy — especially the physical humor involved in the mishaps along the way. There were set mishaps along the way that could’ve been dangerous had they not been well-choreographed and scripted.
Also not easy is playing the character of a bad actor who is playing another character. Confusing enough?
Michael Silvio Fortino played Perkins the butler, but really he was playing the bad actor who had key words written on various limbs as a cheat and then to add to the humor, he mispronounced them.
And Bailey did what he set out to do by bringing this show to the stage. He made people laugh. I laughed so hard, I was crying at one point, and I heard more than one person snorting because they laughed so hard.
There’s a second weekend of “The Play that Goes Wrong,” but tickets won’t last long. The May 20 and 21 productions were sold out. Additional shows are scheduled for 8 p.m. May 26, 27 and 28. For tickets, visit lcnaugusta.com.
Charmain Z. Brackett is the managing editor of The Augusta Press. Reach her at charmain@theaugustapress.com
