REVIEW by Anthony Chase
The last time Western New York saw a professional production of Arsenic and Old Lace was over twenty years ago, when Kathleen Betsko Yale and Anne Gayley played the notorious Brewster sisters, Abby and Martha at the Kavinoky Theatre. After all these years, this beloved old chestnut is again on the boards, this time at Lancaster Opera House. Mary McMahon is playing Abby, with Pamela Rose Mangus as Martha; they were mere girls back in 2003.
For those too young to know already, Arsenic and Old Lace is a comedy by Joseph Kesselring that centers on the Brewster family. Mortimer Brewster discovers that his sweet, elderly aunts Abby and Martha have been poisoning lonely old men as an act of charity. Meanwhile, his brother believes he's Theodore Roosevelt, and another criminally insane brother returns home, adding complication. Mortimer struggles to manage this chaotic situation while trying to maintain his relationship with his fiancée, winsome, but sexually impatient Elaine Harper. The play humorously explores themes of family, madness, and morality.
At Lancaster Opera House, Arsenic and Old Lace is once again providing an opportunity to see some of the region’s best comic actors strut their stuff. Why else would a small non-union theater hire two Equity actors for supporting roles, other than to see the marvelous Kevin Craig as Teddy Brewster (who believes that he is Teddy Roosevelt) and Don Gervasi, who clowns without shame as Elaine’s repressive father, the Rev. Dr. Harper and as Mr. Witherspoon, director of the local insane asylum.
Add to this roster of players, R.J. Voltz, that consummate juvenile lead, now too old for Peter Pan, but perfect for Mortimer Brewster; Anne Roaldi Boucher, now too old for Annie, Anne Frank, Lucy Van Pelt, Mary Lennox, Helen Keller, and all those juvenile roles of the sort she played until she was 30, but perfect for Mortimer’s love interest, the minister’s feisty daughter, Elaine; character actor extraordinaire, David C. Mitchell as Mr. Gibbs, and Lieutenant Rooney; and that irrepressible clown, Jeffrey Coyle as the American theater’s most adored sociopathic serial killer, Jonathan Brewster.
Arsenic and Old Lace is one of those beloved American plays of the old style. It debuted on Broadway in 1941 and stayed there until 1944, clocking 1,444 performances back in the days when a three-and-a-half-year run was still considered astonishing. By comparison, the original production of equally beloved Our Town stayed for only 336 performances – also considered respectable at the time.
Still, while Our Town is soon to open on Broadway for the sixth time, Arsenic and Old Lace has only been revived on Broadway once, way back in 1986 when Polly Holiday and Jean Stapleton portrayed the Brewster sisters, roles created by Josephine Hull and Jean Adair (Google them. You know their faces). Maybe jokes about Boris Karloff in a play that originally featured the actual Boris Karloff, and played to an audience that was old enough to remember when Teddy Roosevelt was president, has less shelf-life than the rueful sentimentality of Our Town.
Nonetheless, since it first burst onto the scene, Arsenic and Old Lace has been a mainstay of high schools and community theaters everywhere, and despite its creaking humor, the title seems to be on many an actor’s’ bucket list.
For high schools and community theaters, among the show’s irresistible attractions are its two fabulous female leading roles and the opportunity to include half the town or school in the production. Those Broadway comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s were sprawling affairs with gigantic casts. There are 14 characters in Arsenic and Old Lace. You Can’t Take it with You has 19. The Man Who Came to Dinner has 33. In 1934, Merrily We Roll Along (the play not the musical) featured 91 actors.
There is always an air of the amateur to a production of Arsenic and Old Lace – and I mean that in the very best sense of the word, “for the love of the art.” Every production is done with love, and the demands of this large cast, two-intermission play ensures that opening night always comes a week too soon. For the record, the Lancaster production did not open after three weeks of preview performances. It opened, as Arsenic and Old Lace typically does, breathlessly and joyfully by the seat of its pants, and it is probable that many actors signed on, simply in anticipation of the pleasure of working with each other.
Structurally, these plays require actors to wait backstage for huge stretches of time before making their entrances for little arias of comedy, from which they retreat to make room for the next comedy act. In their time, a generation of actors weaned on vaudeville was well familiar with the style and pacing of such entertainments.
Think of the character, Officer O’Hara who is an aspiring playwright, winningly played here by Mike Garvey, who enters late in the action and serves to delay the resolution of the play with his absurd effort to convince Mortimer, a drama critic, to listen to a longwinded outline of his script. He serves merely to delay the inevitable, but does so with delicious comic skill. In an era when Broadway represented the height of cultural sophistication, the boring person with aspirations to be a playwright was a familiar comic trope. On the Twentieth Century, You Can’t Take it With You, Present Laughter, Room Service, and The Man Who Came to Dinner, all feature the complication of the aspiring playwright. (It bears mention that The Man Who Came to Dinner also features a comic serial killer).
Locally, we still have an older generation of actors who cut their teeth on old-time comedy, dinner theater and interactive murder mysteries who also understand this style . I was amused on opening night to hear these seasoned pros undiplomatically critique their own show the instant they exited the dressing room, scrutinizing laughs they didn’t expect; moments that could have gone better; props that failed; and costumes that either pleased or disappointed. Be sure that this behavior will continue clear through to the closing performance as they obsessively refine their performances.
For a director, Lancaster Opera House wisely recruited the formidable Peter Palmisano, a man who famously lives in the past of the American theater, as well as the past of the theater of Western New York – his “OFF ROAD with Peter Palmisano - An RLTP Podcast” is a remarkable resource and an invaluable gift to Western New York theater history. (See https://roadlesstraveledproductions.podbean.com/ ). His pedigree lends itself well to this old-fashioned comedy, and he has commandeered the production very successfully.
For those old-timers who are, at this moment, tormenting themselves in an effort to remember who played the roles twenty years ago, Jack Hunter was Teddy; Brendan Powers was Mortimer Brewster; Michael Karr was Johnathan Brewster; John Warren was Dr. Einstein; Adair Luhr was Elaine. Others in the cast included Thomas Martin as the Reverend Dr. Harper, Steven Cooper as Officer Brophy, David Hoffmann as Officer Klein, Joseph Natale as Mr. Gibbs, Todd Benzin as Officer O’Hara, and Carl Kowalkowski as Mr. Witherspoon.
In addition to the sublime performance of the aforementioned Craig as Teddy, Mitchell as Gibbs and O'Hara, and Coyle as homicidal Jonathan, at Lancaster Opera House, Nathanial Higgins is Officer Brophy, and Rich Kraemer is Office Klein, playing the roles capably and with delightful humor.
Phillip Salemi, Jr. returns to the Western New York theater scene to play Dr. Einstein, plastic surgeon to the criminally insane, (a role played by William Hickey in the 1986 revival and by Peter Lorre in the film) with adorable eccentricity.
Vital to the success of they play is the divine casting of Mary McMahon as Abby and Pamela Rose Mangus as Martha. Their performances are certainly the main attraction of the play, and these two impressive pros do not disappoint as they blithely navigate their way through murder. McMahon, imbues Abby with the smug self-confidence that comes with the knowledge that you are morally and culturally beyond reproach – her riff on burying one of her victims alongside a foreigner is priceless in its inappropriateness. Mangus is equally delicious as the aunt who is incapable of resisting flattery.
These impeccably hilarious creations are augmented by a stellar performance from charismatic Mr. Voltz as exasperated Mortimer. He flusters and sputters his way to comic perfection, clear through to the unlikely resolution of the plot.
David Dwyer has provided a handsome set that looks like an extension of the opera house itself. Timmy Goodman’s costumes run the gamut from the serviceable to the inspired. He excels in his loving treatment of the main characters -- Abby and Martha’s funeral attire earns spontaneous peals of laughter.
If you need a fix of old-fashioned comedy, masterfully produced on a modest budget, do yourself a favor. This production fills the bill in every way.
