GARDEN CITY – After four consecutive years of crowd-pleasing performances of The Addams Family – or was it five years? I can’t remember – the Pickleville Playhouse has announced a new show to be staged as its fall production.
The Davis clan has selected the comedy hit The Play that Goes Wrong to be presented Sept. 29 to Oct. 21.
The playwrights – Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields of the London-based Mischief Theatre Company – use the treasured theater gimmick of a play within a play as the setting for The Play that Goes Wrong.
The fictional show is The Murder at Haversham Manor, where on opening night things are quickly going from bad to utterly disastrous.
“This roaring 1920s whodunit has everything you never wanted in a show,” according to Pickleville director Derek Davis, speaking with tongue firmly in cheek. “That includes an unconscious leading lady, a corpse that can’t play dead and actors who trip over everything — including their lines.
“Nevertheless, the accident-prone thespians battle against all odds to make it through to their final curtain call, with hilarious consequences!”
The comedy has been running in London since 2012. The Play that Goes Wrong opened on Broadway in 2017 and played for two years before moving Off-Broadway.
It’s part Monty Python and part Sherlock Holmes, Derek Davis explains. But The Play that Goes Wrong is mostly an award-winning comedy and a global phenomenon that guaranteed to leave northern Utah and southern Idaho audiences paralyzed with laughter.
The cast of The Play that Goes Wrong will feature the best of the best from previous madcap productions at the Pickleville Playhouse.
Derek Davis says that his cast of goofballs will include Kenzie Davis, Nathan Kremin, Jordan Todd Brown and Slater Ashenhurst, among others.
“It just might be the funniest thing we’ve ever done,” the director added.
Given the string of previous stage successes at the Pickleville Playhouse, that’s saying something.
Evening performances of The Play that Goes Wrong are slated for Sept. 29 and Oct. 6, 12 and 20. The comedy will also be staged multiple times on Sept. 30 and Oct. 7, 13, 14 and 21.
Tickets can be purchased online at www.picklevilleplayhouse.com