Review: NOISES OFF Knocks Itself Out at Pittsburgh Public Theater

I must admit right off the bat, when the Public announced Noises Off as its season opener, I smiled but I did not cheer. I saw it during its run a decade ago, and felt relatively certain that once you've seen that sort of farce done well once, you've seen it; how much can you really add to or detract from Michael Frayn's farce-to-end-all-farces anyway? 

Well.

Consider me pleasantly surprised.

Not only does Margot Bordelon's new production of Noises Off live up to my memory of the past one, it imbues a fresh life by adding Pittsburgh's most eminent physical comedian to the cast. Tossing Lara Hayhurst into an ensemble comedy is like tossing Eddie Murphy into 1980s Saturday Night Live: everything around it that was already good, comes to a new A-game around such a gifted comic.

The play is three real-time snapshots of performances by a less than reputable touring theatre company in the UK; the time period is somewhat ambiguous between the seventies and present day (though a truly hilarious sight gag in Act 3 referencing a beloved meme leans it closer to the present). Snapshot one is a shaky final dress rehearsal, snapshot two is a performance a few weeks later, and snapshot three is the end of the tour. The cast begin as tentative buddies, devolving into love triangles, bitter rivalries and absolute chaos by the end. It's hilarious in a pleasantly exhausting way: the nearly three hours of nonstop physical comedy, sight gags and Michael Scott style cringe is designed to push you to your breaking point, not simply go for light chuckles.

Rowan Vickers stars, to some extent, as director Lloyd Dallas, who begins the play as a sort of arch, sarcastic and intermittently vicious presence; imagine the Gordon Ramsey of theatre. Since the show is falling apart around him, as he has affairs with at least two of his cast members, Vickers slowly transitions from playing the straight man to yet another insane clown in the burning circus. Much of Dallas's exasperation comes from his less than reliable cast: scatterbrained Garry (Jeremy Kahn), whose mind moves faster than his mouth and is forever unable to finish a sentence out of character; passionate actor/alcoholic Selsdon Mowbray (Wali Jamal), a old-school theatrical ham descending into drunkenness and senility, and Tim (Matt Henderson), the exhausted stage hand, company manager and "fake Shemp" responsible for filling any onstage or offstage tasks required at any moment. Anyone familiar with Pittsburgh theatre is likely familiar with Jamal and Henderson already; they are mainstays for a reason, and Kahn's "Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent but with brain damage" portrayal of Garry is immensely appealing as well.

And then there is Lara Hayhurst, who I have repeatedly called Pittsburgh's greatest comedic force across multiple reviews. Hayhurst's specialty is taking on aspects of female performativity or male gaze and exploding them to frankly grotesque levels so that the laugh isn't on the "bimbo" character but on the very societal conception of "bimbo." Here, she gets a true star vehicle as the enthusiastically talentless Brooke Ashton. Hayhurst gives Brooke a dead-behind-the-eyes stiffness and a robotic performance style: she hits her lines "in character" exactly the same every time, with a stiffly choreographed pose, pounse or gesture on every single one. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, will pull Brooke off her self-imposed rails, even the physical space around her changing in ways that are frankly self-endangering. Hayhurst sells a pratfall as well as anyone this side of Melissa McCarthy, and two of her stunts in this show are genuinely gasp-inducing.

Even the less overtly-showy roles have much to recommend here: Pittsburgh staple Saige Smith gets less stunts but plenty of laughs (and sympathy) as Poppy, the stage manager and resident punching bag of the company. Linda Mugleston's Dotty (a thinly veiled parody of the recently-deceased Patricia Routledge) is a hoot as the unraveling precedings threaten to literally destroy her sanity, and Ricardo Vila-Roger as the show-within-a-show's straight man cursed with a blood phobia is a walking Chekhov's gun just waiting to go off. It's a stacked cast: just look at the resumes on even those smaller roles. 

Of course, this being Noises Off, there's one final character who must be discussed: the famous revolving set, designed here by Tim Mackabee. When Act 2 began, and the set began to spin to the sounds of disco music, the crowd went wild in a way I didn't expect: enormous, sustained cheers like a bachelorette party watching Magic Mike Live on the Vegas strip. And it wasn't just a novelty moment either: the second spin midway through Act 2 got the same reaction. Though the old adage says "no one ever leaves humming the scenery," the wild response the set got here struck me as a good sign: there's polite applause for a well-staged theatrical feat, but then there's absolute joyful abandon. When a crowd is willing to get into a frenzy over that, you've clearly put them in a headspace where truly anything can happen, like every good comedy should.