Farce

Michael Frayn's "Noises Off" is the ultimate backstage comedy, the Murphy's Law of farces, a show about a British touring company struggling valiantly to stage -- what else? -- a farce. Columbia Community Players' production of this dauntingly fast-paced comedy opens a three-weekend run tomorrow.Bob Russell directs a cast including Stephen Bruun, Dave Gamble, Mo Dutterer, John Parry, Conni Ross, Amy Smith, Katie Thompson and Sharon Templeton.Columbia Community Players performs at Slayton House in Wilde Lake Village Green, Twin Rivers Road and Lynx Lane, Columbia.

The only thing missing from “Boeing-Boeing,” the 1960s farce about a man practicing polygamy-before-marriage with three flight attendants from three different countries, is a disembodied voice announcing “severe turbulence ahead.” Even without that warning, it's obvious from take-off exactly where Marc Camoletti's play is heading. It sure takes its sweet time getting there. To rise above the broadly drawn and belabored parts of the script and generate something memorably comic requires more flair and propulsion than is summoned in Rep Stage's so-so season-closing revival.

The 15th annual Baltimore Playwrights Festival continues with John Morogiello's "Keeping It Aloft," opening tomorrow at the Vagabond Players.Directed by Mike Moran, this fast-paced farce concerns a wealthy middle-age woman who hires a recent ex-con as a gardener. Mayhem results when his identical twin, a respected doctor, shows up unexpectedly. In the process, themes are explored ranging from affirmative action to the quest for the meaning of life.Playwright Morogiello is the resident dramaturg at the Rep Stage Company in Columbia.

According to an old song, there's a broken heart for every light on Broadway. There's also a lot of humor to be mined from all that disappointment, all those shattered dreams littering the theater industry, where producers scramble for backers, playwrights dream way too big, and aspiring actors will leap at any opportunity. Whether “Room Service,” the 1937 farce by John Murray and Allen Boretz, is the best comedy to be inspired by this volatile milieu can be debated. The work, which has been given a welcome, if spotty, revival by Vagabond Players, certainly creaks in places.

Most farce fans associate playwright Ray Cooney solely with Great Britain, but "My Giddy Aunt," a comedy he co-wrote with John Chapman, is set in India. Nor is that the only uncharacteristic thing about it. The show, which opens tomorrow at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, is also part thriller. Mike Moran, a veteran of two other Cooney comedies, directs this daffy tale of eccentric Lady Eppingham, her unscrupulous nephews and her illegitimate half-sister, who is determined to run Lady E's tea estate.

A good farce is like an intricate music box -- the type with lots of movable parts. And, Ken Ludwig's "Lend Me a Tenor" is more like a music box than most since it's about opera. To stretch this metaphor a bit further, at the Spotlighters the music box takes on the added detail of being see-through. That's because the theater's arena staging makes all of the workings visible at all times.Tricky as this may be -- and in this case both the performances and Miriam Bazensky's direction are uneven -- there's also something delightfully fitting about mounting a farce in the round.

THERE is a form of classic farce in which the fool places his trust again and again in a rogue who tricks him every time. He learns no more from experience than the animated cartoon creature who is repeatedly flattened.The United States, the West Europeans and the U.N. have all played the part of the fool in their dealings with the Serbian aggressors in Bosnia. The Serbs promise to be good this time, the fools believe them, and the Serbs immediately renege on their promise.The promises have come whenever it looked as though the outside world might act to stop the Serbian aggression.

At Howard Community College, a troupe of actors is performing a farce called Noises Off about a troupe of actors performing a farce called Nothing On. Confusing? Maybe, but it's also hilarious. In Michael Frayn's comedy set in England, Dottie Otley has organized a touring production to make money for her retirement. She will be playing Mrs. Clackett, a comic housekeeper. The curtain opens on an eight-door, two-level set. We're watching a rehearsal of the first act. It's going badly. The production has had only two weeks of rehearsal and is due to open the next night.

Playwright David E. Talbert is laid back and comfortable, sipping tea and chatting about his successful comedy, "Tellin' It Like It 'Tiz," now playing through Sunday at the Lyric Opera House."

Dave Freeman's "A Bedfull of Foreigners" is a farce about travelers for whom everything goes wrong. But just about everything goes right in Totem Pole Playhouse's production.Set in a run-down French hotel near the German border on the eve of an arcane local festival, the action focuses on five hotel guests. Stanley and Brenda are a husband and wife on a vacation plagued by disasters. Claude is a businessman who is planning to spend a night with his mistress when his wife shows up unexpectedly.

In the Sunday Baltimore Sun, there was an article entitled "Some lawmakers to give back pay" (April 7). It claims that President Barack Obama is showing solidarity and shared sacrifice with the federal employees who are about to be furloughed. What a joke and an insult! President Obama will give back 5 percent of his salary or $16,667. Furloughed employees will be giving back 21 days of pay, about 13 percent of their salaries. If Mr. Obama really wants shared sacrifice, as he states, he would give back 21 days of pay or $32,308.

Prince George's Little Theatre opens its 53rd season by bringing laughter to Bowie Playhouse with playwright Paul Slade Smith's "Unnecessary Farce. " The company's choice of this 2006 whodunit comedy (which is making its Baltimore-Washington area premiere) underscores PGLT's commitment to fun. Audience members can expect to be amused by improbable situations where bumbling characters resort to disguises while dealing with cases of mistaken identity and increasing mishaps. Devoid of brainy pretensions and usually lacking in witty dialogue, the standard farce is mostly physical, with frantically paced action.

Despite the fact that marijuana remains a controlled substance that is illegal in the United States under federal law, 16 states and the District of Columbia have legalized "medical marijuana. " Del. Cheryl Glenn's HB15, the "Maryland Medical Marijuana Act," was introduced and first read on Jan. 11, the first day of this year's General Assembly session. Two more bills calling for legalization of medical marijuana have been introduced since. We would like to make the case that medical marijuana, as currently "prescribed," makes a farce of medicine.

Peter Davis wants the world to know that he's not a fairy godmother, though his appearance suggests the contrary. Dressed completely in pink from fairy wings to a full tutu, Peter Davis is proud to be the hairy godmother in "Over the Moon," a musical comedy about somewhat fractured fairy tales, written by Jodi Picoult. "It is definitely the coolest costume I've ever worn," said the 17-year-old Winter Mills High School junior. The show, a collaboration of several local Carroll County high school theater groups, is set for performances March 9-10 at Winters Mill High School.

The young theater ensembles around town haven't cornered the market on the edgy or the avant-garde. The Vagabond Players , more readily associated with mainstream (or at least near-mainstream) repertoire, is closing its 95th season with a decidedly offbeat item, "Abducting Diana," by Italian playwright Dario Fo, the 1997 Nobel Prize laureate for literature. It's a gutsy choice for the company, but the play, a combination of satire, farce and a dash of commedia dell'arte, seems to suffer in the translation.

"This is a complete farce," says a character in Terry Johnson's "Hysteria." "If I saw it in the theater, I wouldn't believe it." You might feel the same if you catch the stylish Rep Stage production of this 1993 play at Howard Community College, but you're likely to find yourself absorbed, amused, even a little astonished, as well. "Hysteria" has a historical starting point, the 1938 meeting in London between the fatally ill Sigmund Freud and the fanatically self-absorbed Salvador Dali.

WASHINGTON -- Karl Marx was wrong about most things but he was eerily on target when he said, "History repeats itself -- first as tragedy, then as farce."The old commie could have been talking about Watergate and Monicagate.One was Nixonian tragedy. The other is Clintonian farce. The gulf between the somber crisis of 1974 and hyped-up, surreal frenzy of 1998 is enormous, as though in different countries. Never mind whether the sins that chased out Nixon -- abusing FBI, CIA and the IRS -- equate with President Clinton's unzippered lust.

I SAT WITH Carol Burnett's best friend, the former TV star Jim Nabors, for Burnett's opening night on Broadway in Ken Ludwig's farce, "Moon Over Buffalo." Nabors and I had the time of our lives, and so did the audience. But sometimes I think I could have a near-death experience and the Great White Way's critics would describe it as a mere scratch. That is to say, the experience I have in the theater often bears no resemblance to what I then read in the papers. Are drama critics just genuinely jaundiced, or what?

Mrs. Whitaker, the horrific head of a declining upper-class English household in Noel Coward's 1924 play Easy Virtue, snorts that the name of her new daughter-in-law, Larita, the archetypal woman with a past, is "excellent for musical comedy." The director of the new movie version, Stephan Elliott, who also co-wrote the script with Sheridan Jobbins, has taken that line as his clue for how to pep up Coward's musty period piece. He's made a movie full of audiovisual japery, including a soundtrack laced with Coward and Cole Porter songs and tunes such as "Sex Bomb" and "Car Wash" done in faux-Roaring Twenties style.

Shall We Kiss is a sensational date movie. The writer-director-star, Emmanuel Mouret, restores the first kiss to its romantic primacy. He undresses his characters - physically and psychologically - with a light comic touch. They're amorous idealists. They must be sure that they're in love before they bank their future on their passions. They must commit to each other totally before they hurt anyone else in their lives. In the framing story, smart, soulful Emilie (Julie Gayet), a Parisian fabric designer on her first trip to Nantes, meets an affable stranger, Gabriel (Michael Cohen)