COMEDY OF ERRORS
‘Play That Goes Wrong’ has so much going right
The bards of yore didn’t give much consideration to the lowly spittake. Shakespeare and Ibsen don’t include many stage directions commanding actors to use their mouths to shower their fellow cast members. But “The Play That Goes Wrong” elevates the classic gag to an art form.
One of the running jokes in this comedy of errors — running through Nov. 18 at the Emerson Colonial Theatre — involves a bottle of Scotch being replaced with a jug of paint thinner. Over and over, the cast members fail to choke down the corrowhere sive stuff and spray it crudely on anything, or anyone, in their path.
The magical spit-takes combine with scores of ingenious puns, ridiculous pratfalls, clever sight gags and every other vaudevillian slapstick trope to create two hours of madness. Not five seconds transpired during Wednesday’s performance someone in the audience wasn’t laughing wildly.
“The Play That Goes Wrong” operates as a playwithin-a-play with the Cornley University Drama Society attempting to put on fictional whodunit “The Murder at Haversham Manor.” Sadly for them and gleefully for the audience, the company features terrible actors and incompetent stagehands wandering a deathtrap of a set.
Door knobs come off in hands. Actors end up crawling through windows to get back on stage. At one point, so many things have gone wrong that the butler, who has been handcuffed to the chaise lounge and lost the key, is forced to cart the sofa around on his back for half of the second act while pretending it was all according to plan. The wannabe thespians hold true to the adage “the show must go on” even as they fall in and out of character, stumble into each other, forget lines, brawl and steer clear of the crumbling set.
The climax comes with a meticulously choreographed homage to Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill Jr.,” with falling walls narrowly missing the cast. But the entire show features perfect orchestration disguised as complete chaos at a frantic, snowballing pace.
Modern theater leans hard on spectacle. People expect to be dazzled with huge musical numbers, elaborate costumes, special effects and epic stories. This can produce great work from “Hamilton” to “Wicked,” but trying to outdo the last Broadway blockbuster can lead to diminishing returns. “The Play That Goes Wrong” represents something rare. The spectacle comes from the actors, from old-fashioned physical humor and smart situational comedy. Buster Keaton — and Groucho Marx, Lucille Ball, Chevy Chase and Melissa McCarthy — would be proud. “The Play That Goes Wrong,” through Nov. 18, at the Emerson Colonial Theatre. Tickets: $49.50-$154.50; boston.broadway.com.