Noises Off
Opening Night: January 14, 2016
Closing: March 13, 2016
Theater: American Airlines
“Noises Off” follows an ambitious director named Lloyd Davis and his troupe of mediocre actors as they blunder from a bad dress rehearsal to a spectacularly disastrous performance. The cast and crew are putting together a silly sex comedy titled, “Nothing On”—a single-set farce in which lovers frollic, doors slam, clothes are tossed away and embarrassing hi-jinks ensue.
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January 14, 2016
“Where are we?” asks the dazed-looking woman in a maid’s uniform, her voice throaty with fatigue. Looking around with confused wonder, she seems to have just awakened from a yearlong nap, or gone through a carwash without a car. Here are a few clues, Dear: We are on the stage of a provincial theater somewhere in England. We are in the immediate vicinity of several plates of sardines. Also nearby are several doors, grown rickety from serial slamming. As many theatergoers will by now have guessed, this woozy figure, an actress by the name of Dotty Otley, here played by the glorious Andrea Martin, is smack in the dizzying middle of “Noises Off,” the heady, headlong and (sorry, alliteration haters) altogether hilarious farce by Michael Frayn, which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater, providing generous doses of heat-generating laughter as the winter chill finally sets in.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 14, 2016
Classic farce—the kind in which doors get slammed at metronomically regular intervals—is hard to write and harder to stage. Not only does it require timing of immaculately finicky exactitude to ensure that the doors slam on time without decapitating anybody, but it works only when the actors conduct themselves with poker-faced seriousness, behaving as though they’re unaware that the audience is convulsed by their humiliating plight. Nothing kills farce faster than an aren’t-we-silly attitude. At the same time, it’s virtually impossible to film door-slamming farces successfully: The immediate presence of the actors and the physical solidity of the set are necessary in order to create the illusion that total disaster is just around the corner.
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January 14, 2016
In 2016, it’s inarguably a little late to be celebrating the stereotype of the dumb blonde. But the stiff walk and posture that Megan Hilty has created for her clueless character, a stunningly untalented British stage actress cast for her generous curves, are the gift that keeps on giving in Roundabout’s delicious Broadway revival of Noises Off. Whether she’s galumphing around backstage or sashaying through a performance with priceless self-consciousness — delivering every line straight to the audience with a blissful inability to take direction or interact with her fellow cast — Hilty’s Brooke Ashton is a sparkling comic caricature that never gets tired.
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January 14, 2016
Explaining why a thing is funny is hard enough. Trying to account for something you know is hilarious—but then isn’t—is tougher still. Case in point: The Roundabout Theatre Company has revived Michael Frayn’s ingeniously structured 1982 comedy about a group of jobbing British actors trapped inside a failing sex farce. The first act is an endlessly bungled midnight dress rehearsal; the second is a disastrous performance seen from backstage; and the third takes place toward the end of the play-within-the-play’s tour, with the cast battered, demoralized and nearly nuts. “Noises Off” is a precision-timed laugh machine, and director Jeremy Herrin’s ensemble is peppered with some of New York’s finest comic actors. So why did I chuckle so little—perhaps even less than at the weak 2001 mounting?
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January 14, 2016
Here’s Megan Hilty bouncing down a stairway — bounce bounce bounce — and strutting her outrageous stuff in a pink beribboned bustiere, mouth agape and eyes betraying an overabundance of oxygen to the brain. Here, too, is Andrea Martin dueling losingly with sardines, which sometimes fly off the plate like birds heading south for the winter. Politically incorrect? Only if you’re brain dead. This is “Noises Off,” the Roundabout Theatre Company’s happy antidote to all things January, a percussive dose of slamming doors, wince-inducing pratfalls and enough suggestive tomfoolery to fill the bill at Minsky’s.
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