Screwball Sitcom
Theater Review
For
its latest production Spiral Theatre has moved to its third location so far
this season. And while the performance space at Bucketworks’ new location has
all the emotional warmth of a warehouse or an aircraft hangar, it has much
better acoustics than their old performance space in the old Mandel building.
Spiral Theatre brings an endearing degree of warmth to the new space with it’s
production of the 1994 Charles Busch comedy You
Should Be So Lucky.
The
type of show that has been described as a “screwball comedy,” You Should Be So Lucky comes across as
something like the lost pilot episode of a particularly bizarre and zany TV
sitcom that never got picked-up. Director Mark Hooker stars as Christopher, a
down-on-his-luck electrologist operating out of a run-down apartment with
inconsistent electrical service. Christopher’s luck begins to change as he
helps out a wealthy Jewish gentleman named Rosenberg (Terry Gavin). Just as
Polly
(Jenna Wetzel) is a struggling actress with an overdeveloped sense of the
dramatic. She has been kicked out of her lover’s apartment and is without a
place to stay. In spite of the strange first meeting, Rosenberg and Christopher
become friends, and it is through this friendship that Christopher meets a
promising new boyfriend named Walter (Doug Griffin.) Things seem to be going
well until a freak electric surge in the apartment causes
The
ensemble’s comic delivery is seamless in places, but the cast unilaterally
suffers from a lack of modulation between extremes. Wetzel’s Polly, for
instance, has a perfectly affected artificial British accent, but when she
returns to an American accent out of anger and frustration, the contrast isn’t
quite as sharp as it needs to be to maximize the comic effect. To a certain
extent, every cast member suffers from this sort of problem. Many of the finer
details of Charles Busch’s script get lost here, but on the whole, this is a
very fun production.
You Should Be So Lucky runs through May 3.



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