So‘WRONG’ it’s RIGHT
ALT brings to stage a Monty Pythonmeets Sherlock Holmes comedy
Doors stick, props fall and floors collapse. Actors miss cues, forget their lines and step on fingers in this demolition derby of violent dismemberment. A corpse can’t even play dead.
“The Play That Goes Wrong” opens the Albuquerque Little Theatre’s 94th season on Friday, Sept. 8, running on weekends through Sept. 24.
The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s thriller, “The Murder at Haversham Manor” is a country-house whodunit in the cobwebbed tradition of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.” The actors are putting on a 1920s murder mystery, but as the title suggests, everything that can go wrong does. The accident-prone thespians battle against all odds to make it through to their final curtain call in a simulated creepy English manor drawing room.
“It’s a British comedy,” said Henry Avery, ALT executive director. “It’s about a group of amateur performers trying to put on a melodrama.”
Avery had long wanted to stage the play. A traveling version had originally been scheduled to appear at Popejoy Hall during the pandemic shutdown.
“Everybody who’s ever seen it in New York says it’s so much fun,” Avery said. “So much goes wrong, but they’re trying so hard to be serious.
“The plot of the melodrama is someone is murdered on his engagement night,” he continued. “It begins with this person lying dead on the sofa.”
In this Monty Python-meets Sherlock Holmes comedy, the leading lady gets knocked out and the stage manager who has never performed has to take her place and read her lines.
Before the production begins, cast and crew members roam the aisles with distraught purposefulness. They are also in full view on stage, making last-minute adjustments to falling fireplace mantels and stuck doors (in vain.)
An anxious introduction from its director and leading man, Chris Bean precedes the show. Mr. Bean vacillates between arrogance and self-abasement as he describes earlier productions by the company that had to be retitled because of limited budgets: “Two Sisters,” “The Lion and the Wardrobe” and “Cat.”
The play won Best New Comedy at the 2015 Laurence Olivier Awards and ran on Broadway from 2017-2019.
“I think it’s going to be good for bringing people back to the theater,” Avery said.
ALT will perform “Camelot” beginning on Nov. 3 and “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” starting on Dec. 8.