Chaotic Comedy Coming To Bushnell
‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ Tour Follows Broadway Run
The Mischief Theatre has gone too far, but then that’s what they’re known for. In its native England, the comedy troupe has created three smash theater hits in a row. The first of these, “The Play That Goes Wrong” became a Broadway hit as well and is heading out on tour. The tour’s second stop is at The Bushnell Sept. 25 to 30, opening the theater’s 2018-19 Broadway Series.
Like all things Mischief Theatre touches, the tour has already led to unexpected developments that might seem calamitous if the company didn’t already thrive on chaos. Instead, they’re creating new comic possibilities.
The producers of “The Play That Goes Wrong” had originally planned to close the show’s long-running Broadway production in August and bring that cast directly out on a national tour. Then came an opportunity to extend the New York run (at the Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street) for a few more months. Now the Broadway closing date is Jan. 6, and a new cast had to be hastily gathered for the tour.
The play is an exercise in carefully orchestrated chaos. The show purports to be a performance by a lowly prize-winning university theater troupe, hoping to dazzle the audience with their masterful rendition of a tiresome old mystery
drama “The Murder of Haversham Manor.” The night does not go as planned.
What makes this play stand apart from so many other blunder-filled comedies — including the one that it is most often compared to, Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” — is the extremes that the Mischief Theatre has gone to in making sure that its wrongness is excessive, extreme and spectacular. We’re not talking about broken
“Our process tends to be that we write as ambitiously as we can, and take it as far as
we can.”
Henry Shields, co-founder
chairs or shattered vases here. We’re talking couches, desks and grandfather clocks. The actors don’t just succumb to stage fright — they’re knocked out and comatose.
“Our process tends to be that we write as ambitiously as we can, and take it as far as we can,” says Mischief Theatre co-founder Henry Shields, by phone from England earlier this month. “Fairly early in the process, we start collaborating with the set designers.
“We’ve always said you want the set to look perfect, because it’s that much funnier when you start to deconstruct it. Seeing a cheap set fall apart isn’t very funny.”
“The Play That Goes Wrong” has toured extensively in Europe and elsewhere, so readying a U.S. tour has packed no special surprises for the company.
“It’s pretty well contained, actually,” Shields says. “One big bit of kit that has a load of pneumatics. We haven’t had to make any changes in order to tour. The only real changes are to the script.” Britishisms like “polytechnic” and “white spirit,” Shields says, have been translated as “university” and “paint thinner.”
One thing that’s notable about Mischief Theatre shows — particularly the recent “The Comedy About a Bank Robbery” — is their strong, dynamic female characters, especially in shows where you might expect to encounter old-fashioned damsels-in-distress. There’s also a genuine effort at racially diverse casting.
“Making the female characters as strong as possible comes from the women in our company, who are all very strong,” Shields says. As for diversity, “our core group of eight actors is all white, and we’re aware that’s not ideal. The core team originates each shows and develops them over a period of three or four months. But once we move on from it, we make sure each new cast has some diversity.”
The touring cast includes Scott Cote, who was at The Bushnell last year as the bloviating Brother Jeremiah in “Something Rotten”), Peyton Crim, Brandon J. Ellis, Angela Grovey (from Broadway’s recently closed “Escape to Margaritaville”), Ned Noyes, Jamie Ann Romero, Evan Alexander Smith (who toured in “Dirty Dancing”), Yaegel T. Welch, plus understudies Blair Baker, Jacqueline Jarrold, Sid Solomon and Michael Thatcher. The show is also currently touring the UK, and toured Australia last year.
Shields is credited, alongside Henry
Lewis and Jonathan Sayer as co-author of all three of Mischief Theatre’s West End hits: “The Play That Goes Wrong,” “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” and “The Comedy About a Bank Robbery.”
“There are we three writers,” he explains, “plus three other members of the core team, then two more members that we bring in later on. All eight of us are considered contributors to each show.”
The Mischief Theatre is currently working on multiple new projects, Shields says. One of them is a BBC sitcom based on the basic “Play That Goes Wrong” concept. Shields is hopeful that the show will get made — “if nothing goes horribly wrong.”
As if he’d have it any other way.
“The Play That Goes Wrong” runs Tuesday through Sept. 30 at the Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Tickets start at $23. bushnell.org