There Goes the Bride - Louis B Hobson

There was a time when theatres routinely presented farces as part of their seasons. Not just comedies, but actual farces, and the British sex farces were the favorites.

That has changed. Stage West occasionally does a farce, but it is Morpheus who had kept up the tradition, and we should be grateful they still produce them.

Morpheus' latest offering is the 1972 farce by John Chapman and Ray Cooney, who coauthored two dozen of these silly comedies. This is not one of their best but it has the possibility of being riotous.

When Stage West did it 6 years ago, they edited down to a 100 minute one-act. That's about how long the first act of Morpheus' version lasts, and there is a second act tagged on. It's too long for this one joke comedy.

The joke is that on the day of his daughter's wedding, harried ad man Timothy Westerby gets hit on the head and the flapper girl he has envisioned for his latest bra ad comes to life. The problem is, only he can see and hear her. It's a riff on Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. The flapper is a bit of a tease and she awakens a zest Timothy hasn't felt in years.

One of the elements of British sex farce is that there is a great deal of mistaken identity, and that is really the essence of There Goes the Bride, besides the invisible flapper and a lot of sexual inuendo.

As the grandparents of the bride, Peter Warne and Alana Gowdy have the best jokes and shtick, and fortunately, they know how to deliver.

Elizabeth Greenwood has the thankless job of playing the straight woman to all the nonsense that goes on in the nearly 150 minutes. She definitely is a trooper.

Mike Johnson is the harried Timothy and a wannabe Fred Astaire. It's an exhausting performance, and he chooses not to be transformed into a great dancer so the joke is just how bad a hoofer he is.

The costumes for the women in this play are strange choices to say the least. The mother of the bride is in BLACK. At the end of the play, Gowdy says she is going to the church to show off her dress. It couldn't be more traditional. The joke should be that she is over dressed. Her choice of dresses and hat should get a huge laugh when she enters. It should be as if she is going to Ascot and not just her granddaughter's wedding. The flapper should be in a rather risque outfit. Danielle Dulmadge's is too proper. 

The bigger problem with director Wayne Hunter's production is the pacing. Actors should be dashing on and off stage, as well as around it, and lines should be delivered at breakneck pace.

There was a good deal of laughter at the performance I attended which means it could have been so much funnier if Hunter and his actors had wound things up much tighter.