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Confident cast members pace themselves so the audience is swept along, not swept away.
By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSEN
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 18, 2000
Ken Ludwig's Moon Over Buffalo is one of those wacky comedies that can make you forget the cares of the world and your own aches and pains and just laugh out loud.
That's what the audience did at Thursday's opening of Moon at Richey Suncoast Theatre, thanks to an outstanding eight-member cast and impeccable direction and costuming by Dick Poole. The whole thing was so much fun, you could forgive the occasional actor who chimed in too quickly after another's good laugh line or when the lights went down a tad too quickly.
Moon Over Buffalo is set backstage of a Buffalo, N.Y., theater in 1953. The almost over-the-hill stage actors George and Charlotte Hay (Charles Skelton and Ginger King) are ecstatic when they hear that movie director Frank Capra is coming to see them during a one-night stop at the seedy little theater where they have taken their little repertory company to do Cyrano de Bergerac and Private Lives. Things seem finally to be going their way, until Charlotte learns that George has had a disastrous fling with the company's simpering ingenue, Eileen (Susie Johnson).
Charlotte threatens to run away with the love-struck family lawyer, Richard (Jon DeYoung), which sends George into a drunken binge that renders him incapable of appearing in the show that might launch the two into stardom.
Meanwhile, the Hays' daughter Rosalind (Jomary Betancourt) keeps trying to introduce her fiance, Howard (Jonathan Hope), the TV weatherman who thinks he is an actor, but the Hays think he's really Frank Capra, mainly because Charlotte's hard-of-hearing mother, Ethel (Eileen Huntington), has misheard how he introduced himself.
Rosalind's former boyfriend Paul (Kurt R. Schultz) hangs out on the edges, hoping to eventually edge back into her life.
This is a play that could easily get out of hand and exhaust both players and audience, but Poole and his cast members pace themselves and their characters so that the audience is swept along instead of being swept away.
Ms. King is a delight as the irrepressible Charlotte, a bundle of dramatic ambition just waiting to be a sensation. Ms. King's twinkling eyes and sassy manner create a Charlotte who is coy without being cutesy.
Skelton creates a George who is sweetly appealing, warts and all. George knows he isn't perfect, but neither is life -- nor love, for that matter. Skelton resists the temptation to really ham it up, letting his character be gently revealed over the course of the two-hour show. Skelton's George doesn't overpower the stage, but he makes his moments count.
An audience favorite is Ms. Huntington as the affably judgmental mother/mother-in-law Ethel. Ms. Huntington's comic timing is unerring, her cadenced delivery always right on the mark. Ms. Huntington's Ethel is the epicenter for a cast filled with justified confidence.
Set designer Bruce Blaine's long experience in theater shows in the authentic look of the backstage room where all the action takes place -- well-worn, messy, chaotic and strewn with the detritus of theater life. The seven-member set building crew got in all the details, and properties head Lisa Fergeson put in all the right touches, from the dusty blackboard to the makeshift coffee bar.
(Now, if only that onstage clock would always keep time with the script . . . .)
WHAT: Moon Over Buffalo
WHERE: Richey Suncoast Theatre, 6237 Grand Blvd., New Port Richey
WHEN: Weekends through Dec. 3. Performances at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays
TICKETS: $8 adults, $4 students. Box office is open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and one hour before each show. Call (727) 842-6777