Review: Curio has its way with 'Noises Off!'

Leave it to Curio Theatre to turn a crowd-pleaser into an even bigger hit. The West Philadelphia ensemble company has built its reputation on staging edgy comedies (What the Butler Saw, Catch-22), adaptations of classics (The Trial, Slaughterhouse Five) and brilliantly envisioned productions of Shakespeare, such as last season's female-centered Romeo and Juliet.

So I didn't expect the Curio company to cap its 10th season with Michael Frayn's Noises Off!, perhaps the most popular farce ever written. And when I studied the towering set designed by Paul Kuhn, my curiosity deepened, seeing no turntable mechanism to rotate the traditional staging from one act to the next.

Frayn's comedy wants a rotating set to show the front- and back-of-the-house goings-on of a British touring company putting on a ridiculous farce (dialect coach William Thwaites deserves credit for the excellent clarity of the ensemble's speech). The offstage antics prove more interesting and far funnier, the action revolving around who's sleeping with whom, an undependable actor's drinking problems, and the faux-family atmosphere of a cast that starts a run with smiles and warmth and ends in catty little cliques and fistfights.

Under Peter Reynolds' direction, the laughs start the moment Aetna Gallagher, as Dotty, waddles on stage carrying on about "sardines, sardines," the banana-peel prop stand-in that drives much of the humor in Acts I and III. Newton Buchannan balances the physical antics with a healthy dose of sarcasm as the beleaguered director, Lloyd, and Isabella Fehlandt, as Brooke, breaks any tension with her airheaded antics.

The players in the fake production called Nothing On provide the rest of the hilarity, with recent UArts graduate Andrew Carroll delivering a crazed and stuttering performance that's nothing short of comic genius.

Gallagher's costume designs set the show squarely in the soap opera-driven 1980s, with turtlenecks under checked coats, floppy side ponytails and paint-splatter jeggings. When the set finally does turn to reveal the backstage pantomime of Act II, Kuhn's staging doesn't quite attain the level of grandeur he has achieved in other Curio productions (such as Eurydice and The Tempest), but it indicates that this company, 10 years young, will continue to apply its unique and clever approach to any work it sees fit to stage.

Noises Off! Through May 30 at Curio Theatre Company, 4740 Baltimore Ave. Tickets: $15-$25. Information: 215-525-1530 or curiotheatre.org

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