Moon Over Buffalo

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

OK, so this is the third time in a year, a local theatre has chosen to produce Ken Ludwig’s roller coaster hilarious Moon Over Buffalo. Quite honestly, if you have seen it many times before, or have never seen it at all, there are two important reasons to include the Evergreen Players into the schedule.

Evergreen Player’s production of Moon Over Buffalo.

First: Bernie Cardell directed.

Second: the superb talented cast grabs the script by its throat making it their own. They don’t care it has been done a hundred and one times. At this moment in time and history it belongs to them.

The actors dive head first into the script creating magnificent characters with timing perfected to the Nth degree, definite requirements to bring Buffalo alive, and this production is definitely alive.

Multiple plots run throughout the play. George and Charlotte Hay have nestled down into the Erlanger Theatre in Buffalo, New York with their reparatory company performing Cyrano De Bergerac and Private Lives alternately.

Their daughter Roz got fed up to the gills with theatre chaos and broke away from the “family business.” She returns to visit her parents, eager to introduce her fiancé, Howard to them, and secretly to connect with Paul, a man she loves but at the moment doesn’t like, and not about to admit to anyone she wants to see him.

The company’s New York Lawyer, Richard carries a flaming torch for Charlotte concocting a reason to fly to Buffalo, take her to lunch, and convince her to run away with him.

A company actress, Eileen discovers she is pregnant. Charlotte suspects George has been sleeping with Eileen. George becomes hysterical. And then Eileen writes Charlotte a note. Another actor quits just before a show is scheduled, and Roz finds herself thrust into the role and the life she thought she wanted to escape.

And that’s only the beginning. Underlying George and Charlotte’s motivation is for Charlotte to become a big time movie star, while George just wants to be rich and famous, only to be aced out by Ronald Coleman and Greer Carson in a Scarlet Pimpernel movie. Their gills turn green right on stage.

If that’s not enough to send the roller coaster sailing high wide and handsome, Charlotte learns Coleman broke his legs, and Frank Capra is flying out to Buffalo to catch the matinee to consider George, unbeknownst to the chaos running around loose out its cage.

And then there is grandma, Charlotte’s mother, heard of hearing, with no love lost between her and George.

Mix this plot together with mistaken identities, tortured emotions, crispy chaos, strained relationships jumping to conclusions, jumping in and out of the green room where most of the action takes place, and what you have is Moon Over Buffalo with a plus.

The plus just happens to be the delicious set designed by Cardell and dressed with grand detail by Mari Geasair, giving the impression one is actually peering into a theatre’s green room with playbills and photos posted on the walls from previous productions, a backstage hallway leading into the green room, and a bulletin board listing production schedules.

The plus also includes the magnificent developed characters interacting with honest chemistry and actors who are having a blast with their characters and with each other.

With an overblown ego, George demands his creator be endowed with tremendous physical energy, consistency, play inebriation with believability, trust in falling without hesitation, and Len Matheo provides George with it all.

Charlotte carries a longing to be a big time movie actress. She aches to be known and loved by everyone who sees her. She dearly loves George, but has a built in gumption to stand on her own two feet. She carries suspicion as close to her as she does a script. She wears her emotions on her sleeve with the tendency to jump to conclusion all too quickly, loves life, loves the theatre exuding a slight hint of dumb blond, easily excited, with a heart as big as all outdoors. Carol Gartner provides Charlotte with every inch of Charlotte’s personality.

Haley Johnson gives their daughter Roz a sense of wanting freedom, wanting a relative traditional life, wanting something of a peaceful life, she thinks. Even with her sense of traditionalism, Johnson also gives Roz a tinge of mysterious suspicion as to her motivation for returning to the theatre to see her parents at that particular moment. Does she really want to marry the quaking, unsure shaking in his boots Howard? Or does she have some secret she lives with? Tradition and shaking in his boots question the viability of marriage. Patrick Collins is hysterical as Howard from his fearful star struck meeting with George and Charlotte, to his inability to speak up to the harried hurried Charlotte, to a secret pride in being a weatherman, Collins sees to it naiveté speaks loudly from Howard’s demeanor. Secret because his ego is plastered in a drowned self-esteem.

Jessica Clare provides Eileen with the over-reactive, in love with love ingénue who falls one night for George’s passion. In meeting with a newfound love of her life, Clare shows an Eileen holding self-determination that goes way beyond the theatre.

With a lawyer mentality, confident in his position, Scott Gibson covers Richard with bold assurance. He loves Charlotte, intending to audaciously sweep her off her feet. George is no contest for him. He knows George too well, and he’s good at making promises he can’t keep. Gibson shows Richard’s truth with clarity especially when his audacious balloon explodes in his face at the end of the play discovering his bravado only brings aloneness alone on center stage. Richard’s role could easily become a non-plus role for just a body with everything else going on around him. Gibson ensures that doesn’t happen.

Then there’s Grandma. If Ludwig knew Kathleen Davis would be playing Ethel he would have written her a bigger part. She falls into the sharp-edged, say whatever pops into her mind, wears whatever she sees first no matter how outrageous, feeds her intense dislike for George as though serving a banquet, plays with her hearing loss as a child plays with a new toy and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, she thinks it better. Kathleen Davis molds her with great delight, playing her jokes straight. Her jokes aren’t jokes. They’re straight out of Ethel’s for real character’s mouth.

When Roz asks her If she has her hearing aid in, Ethel thinks she’s asking if she wants a glass of lemonade creating it all too real and honest.

If anything cold be said about the current production, besides how fun and entertaining it is, it would be for the tendency, especially Matheo and Collins, to lean a little too heavy on the funny lines blowing them up bigger than what they are. That tends to ignore the intelligence of the audience. An audience knows a funny line when it’s heard. When it is said straight, when the character honestly believes in his being, that he is right, and gives a funny line as though it is from his belief system over against just being funny, the line becomes hysterical. That also goes for exaggerated movements.

When George hits the bars, returning in a drunken stupor, his falling leans toward “isn’t this funny” rather than he has just had too much to drink. Howard also leans toward this especially in the very funny scene between he and Charlotte when she has mistaken him for Capra. His lines are funny. The body language points toward funny when he should be pointing toward confusion.

The Evergreen Players’ production of Moon Over Buffalo is a prime example for the wanting of local theatres to find a way to coordinate their schedules of what they want to do and when. With the fierce competition for theatre audiences, it can only hurt when theatres mount the same play. Most people aren’t willing to see the same show three times within a year, no matter how good the production is, simply because there are so many other outstanding plays to chose from. With the skillions of plays available, and skillions rarely done, there well could be opportunity for theatres to chose those that aren’t being done at all, that carry the same weight, that are familiar to potential audiences, that would draw an audience.

The Evergreen Players’ production of Moon Over Buffalo is definitely worth seeing. No question. Direction is concise and deliberate, the cast noteworthy, the set pleasantly delightful, the lighting designed by Dave Avery, the sound designed by Cardell and Avery classic, and the costumes designed by Fran Gibson and Cindy Franke fit the characters and actors to a tee, including Cyrano’s nose.