It is crazy fun to tear absolutely everything down, especially on a theatrical stage. Just ask Donald Trump. True genius in destruction, however, resides in how you build everything back up again, to reveal the full scope, the scale of your devastation.
This is the magic revealed in The Play That Goes Wrong, the Olivier Award-winning, London-born catastrophe of a production that opened last night at the Lyceum Theatre, one of Broadway’s oldest playhouses, whose venerable, 114-year history veritably trembles in concert with the crumbling craziness of The Play That Goes Wrong.
The fun is anything but high-minded. Yet, there is something elevated about the perfect understanding of theatrical enterprise in its entirety exhibited by The Play That Goes Wrong. Unlike our President’s utter vacancy in taking a fire ax to American institutions, the trio that created The Play That Goes Wrong (Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields) as well as the cast they lead through its imploding labyrinth, know exactly what they’re doing.
Failure is the flipside of every gesture in the theater; the possibility that you will fail to make your entrance, fail to make your exit, fail to recall your next line, fail to pronounce it properly, fail to power your legs to your next mark downstage, fail to find your mark, fail to remember where the hell your mark is, fail to find the prop that was supposed to be there, fail to hang onto the prop once you’ve grabbed it, along with the vast potential failures of lighting, sets and costumes.
This essentially is a synopsis of The Play That Goes Wrong. To summarize any plot beyond this is beside the point; the thing is a murder-mystery-by-the-numbers that serves solely to set the failures in motion. It really matters not who killed who, when, where or why. The authors themselves could not care less. In a Presidential sense, the point is all in the takedowns.
The fact that The Play That Goes Wrong was a first-time effort by its authors and actors, fresh out of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and initially performed in a pub, makes perfect sense. That they are all here, the original West End cast, onstage at the Lyceum, is a real treat. That they are directed, as in London, by Mark Bell, is critical. Mr Bell keeps everyone in motion deliriously and seemingly without serious injury.
My 11-year-old daughter Sara had an absolute ball, of course. The laughs are non-stop and most of them are really cheap. Deep thinking is pretty much abandoned, though Sara and I found ourselves talking a lot about the individual elements of disaster after. Sara felt that the entire show was a less subtle remake of Noises Off, which she so loved in its Roundabout Theatre revival last season. I agreed with her. Less subtle was fine, we both felt. There is always room for more or less theatrical destruction, when you do it right.