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'Out of Order'

By: Stuart Duncan, TIMEOFF

05/31/2006

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Off-Broadstreet Theatre takes on this Ray Cooney favorite.

   Ray Cooney is often called England's Neil Simon. He began as a child actor and appeared with various repertory companies in the 1950s, and in 1961 began his writing career. Since then he has had 18 plays produced in London's West End, including Run for Your Wife, London's longest-running comedy. It has not been unusual for Cooney to have two or even three plays running at the same time.
   One of his most popular (and funniest) is Out of Order, which opened in May 1990, made its way to London by September, and then came over to the States, including a run at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn. Cooney himself directed and on several occasions (including Paper Mill) played a major role. At the time critics felt the play was full of fun, but lacked the usual zest of many Cooney efforts. Some felt it was because the playwright was on stage, prepared to steal scenes if he could.
   Off-Broadstreet Theatre in Hopewell has solved any problems of that sort. Director Bob Thick has "tweaked" the original script and an expert cast of 10 romps through playwright Cooney's dialogue as if shot from a cannon. Each character is perfectly capable of stealing a scene and each proceeds to do exactly that, one after the other.
   The plot has so many twists and turns you might well be on Lombard Street in San Francisco. Richard Willey (played with great bravado by Tom Orr) is Prime Minister Tony Blair's floor manager for a parliamentary bill going through one of the houses. But on this particular evening he is interested in a different sort of "all-nighter." In fact he has just checked into the Westminster Hotel, right next to Parliament with Jane Worthington (Rebekah Shearn), secretary to a bigwig in the opposition party. They have ordered champagne and oysters and the immediate future looks promising indeed.
   Of course, there are a few problems on the horizon: when they part the curtains to suite 648, there apparently is a dead body trapped by the window, just off the balcony. The house manager (played with stentorian authority by Curtis Kaine in one of his best roles recently) takes rather unkindly to dead bodies in his establishment and naturally no one wants the police alerted. Furthermore, Willey's wife (Christy McCall, returning to OBT after far too long) is planning to drop in, just to surprise him. The room waiter (John Anastasio, another veteran missed recently) finds his visits to suite 648 extremely profitable. And Willey's personal aide, George Pigden (Patrick Andrae, playing the role that Cooney handled, but with far more finesse and therefore much funnier) is by no means the help he was expected to be.
   Jane Worthington's boyfriend (Dave Frank) is in a decidedly ugly mood once he figures out what is really going on. In time, Pigden's mother's nurse, Gladys (Susan Fowler), also shows up. And, being a Cooney farce, the body (Bill Bunting) comes to life (more or less) since Mama is distressed that her boy isn't home for "nighty-night" yet.
   Suite 648 is indeed a busy place, what with that window that clearly seems to have a mind of its own and in time almost everyone gets to spend some time in the closet and the ladies manage (in Cooney tradition) to lose much of their clothing. Director Thick's "tweaking" leads to big laughs. For example, the original script has the room waiting "coming out of the cabinet" (a play on words for the British). Thick merely changes it to "coming out of the closet" and the reaction is a huge roar of laughter. He also keeps the pace reasonably frenetic, but never frantic.
   Out of Order is just plain funnier in Hopewell than it was in London, or for that matter, at Paper Mill.

Out of Order continues at Off-Broadstreet Theatre, 9 S. Greenwood Ave., Hopewell, through July 1. Performances: Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2:30 p.m. Tickets cost $25.25 Fri. and Sun., $27 Sat. Doors open one hour earlier for desserts and beverages. For information, call (609) 466-2766.