Set the stage for romance

Music, chocolate and more sweeten Valentine’s Day.

Angela Covey will be 80 this year and has been married 58 of those years. She’s also been involved with the Fort Smith Little Theater for 40 years.

It seems, she says, the right time for her to retire. But the leading lady from “Noises Off” will send her audience out laughing by directing the first show of the 2016 season, “Farce of Nature.”

Covey says she’s enjoyed directing several shows by the three-writer team of Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten, most recently “Dixie Swim Club.” Unlike that predecessor, which Covey says had a lot of heart, “Farce of Nature” is “just light and something to make you smile.” The premise is that the proprietors of the Reel ‘Em Inn in Mayhew, Ark., are seeking help to bring “the finest little fishing lodge in the Ozarks” back from the brink of obsolescence, and to do that, they need an investor.

Add to the misadventures of the married couple — and her plan to bring romance back to their lives through hypnosis — the arrival of a retired police officer, an aspiring actor, his girlfriend, a Chicago gangster, a sexy gangster’s wife chasing after the “boy toy actor” and a big-city investor. It is, says Covey, a recipe for “fast-paced hilarity.”

Covey has her own fast-paced plans for retirement. With five children, 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren — none of them living in Fort Smith — she and her husband intend to hit the road. That’s nothing new; she met and married him while he was serving in the military in her native England and followed him to Fort Smith.

Neither does she plan to leave

Fort Smith Little Theater in the lurch.

“I’ll still be involved,” she says. “In things that I want to do that are not so time consuming — not Monday through Friday for eight weeks out of your life.”