Review: Don't Dress For Dinner @ Santa Clara Players

[howeird]

Very quick review because it doesn't deserve much more than a mention. Santa Clara Players performs small-cast plays, usually in two acts (even if they were written in three) in a cozy space behind the Triton Museum in what had been an art gallery pavilion but is now a 60-seat (or so) theater.

Don't Dress For Dinner by Marc Camoletti and adapted by Robin Hawdon is a forced farce which hinges on multiple mistaken identities. It is more forced than farce, the initial setup makes no sense at all, and the rest of the show pretty much follows from there.

The setup:

The husband has invited his mistress to visit him while his wife is away. He has booked a chef to cook for them. He has also inexplicably invited his best friend to stay the weekend.

The twist:

His best friend is having an affair with his wife. When his wife hears best friend is coming for the weekend, she cancels her trip.

The farce:

The cook and the mistress are both called "Suzi". One is Suzette and the other is Suzanne, but the playwright may have well have named them both Beulah.

The men in the cast (Husband, best friend, chef's husband) come to us from the "just say your lines and remember your blocking" school of drama. There was little or no actual acting on their parts. The wife did some actual acting for a few minutes here and there, and the chef showed signs she might break out into a character, but the mistress didn't. The best friend only had two voices: loud and hoarse screaming.

The set looked great until someone slammed one of the many doors. Lighting is limited in this space, but the set and actors were lit well, and there was only one real light cue.

Costumes were modern dress. The bedroom garb was pretty strange. The mistress closed the show in Frank's outfit from Rocky Horror and didn't look much better in it than he did. The wife wore a stunning nightgown negligee which was too much like what a wife who is trying to please her husband would wear than a woman seducing her lover would. And the chef's outfits just plain sucked. There was a very ornate on-stage change scene where the husband and best friend turn the chef into a mistress, but she looked like a velvet sausage in the resulting tube dress.

Reading the program and from some insider info (I have been involved in several SCP shows) this show was pre-cast. That's against SCP rules. In this case it also produced a mediocre performance.

One kind word - many of the lines in this show are extremely difficult expositions of "the plot so far". The script is very difficult all the way through. The cast all had the words nailed.

Three more shows, Thurs-Sat 8 pm
Triton Museum Hall Pavilion
Warburton & Don, Santa Clara
408-248-7993 to reserve tickets (a good idea, it's a small theater with a large subscriber list)

Comments

Not Ready for Prime Time

[bigcatroary.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear the SCP farce was a disappointment. Farces are fun to act in, assuming one can act. And in an intimate setting it's all the more important. Where have all the good actors gone anyway? Used to be they could be gotten from Santa Clara University. Maybe they all moved to New York. Maybe they are all Woking in the park. Chow.

Re: Not Ready for Prime Time

[howeird]

On paper, these are highly qualified actors. On stage they mostly are not. Many have an MFA in drama, at least three come from a local Shakespeare troupe, and they were all chosen because they had worked or studied with the director. There was no audition notice sent out for this show, and a couple of board members need to be spanked for allowing a pre-cast show. Though I understand how they were tempted by a director with a package deal.

The directing was superb as far as blocking and line rehearsing goes. Casting was not too bad in that all the actors pretty much looked like their characters should look. Maybe they just needed more rehearsal time after they got their lines down. It's hard to be your character when you're still "reading" your lines out of that script in your head.

Where have all the good actors gone anyway?
New York, Palo Alto and Mountain View.