Dentures in the soup and other hijinks
Amusing improvised dinner theatre based on Fawlty Towers plays at NAC
The hijinks begin early in Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience, a new theatrical dinner show based on the BBC sitcom that opened Tuesday night at the NAC’s Panorama Room.
In fact, the laughs started during cocktails when the hapless Manuel, played by Andy Foreman, tried to serve peanuts to the 50 or so dinner guests, much to the despair of an exasperated Basil, played by Benedict Holme. It was all uphill from there, and the laughs kept coming between the mismatched pair and the authoritative Sybil, played by Alison Pollard-Mansergh, who tried to keep things running smoothly.
The show is making its North American debut in Ottawa and will later have engagements in Toronto and Halifax. It’s a rollickingly fun piece of dinner theatre, with the able cast serving dinner and plenty of laughs to an amused and captive audience in the elegant Panorama Room, overlooking the Rideau Canal.
About one-third of the show is scripted and the rest is improvised, meaning that the results can be wildly entertaining, especially when the cast interacts with the dinner guests. And they did Tuesday night, with Manuel pulling guests out of their seats, standing on a table and scurrying around the room to catch a runaway mouse.
It’s all pretty frantic and crazy, with dentures showing up in soup bowls, Happy Birthday singalongs to guests and lots of double entendres delivered by the comical but serious-looking Manuel. The cast is quite good. Holme passes off an admirable John Cleese imitation and Alison Pollard-Mansergh is downright scary as the no-nonsense Sybil.
The show moves along at a brisk pace, but there were a few times when the action ground to a halt, and there was an awkward silence as dinner guests looked at each other, wondering what was going to happen next. And the table seating in the long rectangular Panorama Room sometimes made it difficult to catch the shenanigans on the far side of the room.
Guests get a choice of cannelloni, chicken and a beef dish, which were all fine, according to guests at our table, although I’m just not sure that serving cannelloni with a side order of mashed potatoes is the right thing.
The BBC series set in Fawlty Towers, a fictional hotel in a seaside town, was first broadcast in 1975. Only 12 episodes were filmed, but it’s become a cult favourite. You don’t have to be a fan of the TV series to enjoy this show, but it would help.