GARDEN CITY – The Pickleville Playhouse’s 2023 season opener Thick as Thieves is a neat little show crafted around a play within a play.
It worked for Shakespeare, right?
The play within a play gimmick gives director/playwright Derek Davis an excuse to hilariously breath life into every tired theater cliché from the old “no new ideas” bit to backstage diva myths to actors driven psycho by repeated rejections at auditions.
From curtain to curtain, it’s a complete hoot!
The show is full of theatrical inside jokes and you can tell that Derek Davis had as much fun writing Thick as Thieves as you’ll have watching it.
For a change, the title characters in this musical melodrama aren’t really thick, as Will Mosier and Nathan Kremin proclaim in the show’s cute opening number.
The pair are slick con artists from an impoverished theater family improbably named Roger and Hamm R. Stein (get it?) who are out to make a killing if it kills them.
And it might.
Pickleville newcomer Mosier is smooth as silk in the role of Roger, while playhouse veteran Kremin’s characterization of Hamm gives new meaning to the term sibling rivalry.
The con artists are being dogged by Brisket, a meat-obsessed detective who may have a few other quirks in her closet. She blackmails them into putting on a show at the old family theater while helping to solve their parents’ murder.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss the always watchable Kenzie Davis’ digital cameo as the recently deceased Mama Stein.
After experience as stage manager for recent Pickleville on Tour shows, Jaycee Harris breaks into the spotlight as Brisket with brilliant comic timing.
Another newcomer Annika Erickson appears as the loyal Becky the Techie, a backstage drone at the theater. She has an amusing running gag where she yells every time she lies (which is often) and has a singing voice that can belt a tune right out of the rustic playhouse and across Bear Lake.
Pickleville veteran Taylor Hall, who just happens to be a dead ringer for Joe Exotic the Tiger King, memorably plays the theater’s cantankerous neighbor Jim Wilde.
Rounding out the cast of Thick as Thieves as bombshell showgirl Alexa is the luscious Katja Roberts, although her curves are anything but round.
In the run-up to the premier of Thick as Thieves, Derek Davis had promised Pickleville audiences a real doozy of a show that was full of chaos, catastrophe and curve balls. Once again, the Davis clan’s mad bard delivered in spades on that promise.
The only false note in Thick as Thieves is a plot twist at the final curtain that doesn’t really work. After a night of side-splitting hilarity, however, who cares at that point?
Thick as Thieves will be continue to be performed in repertory with the Pickleville Playhouse’s revival of The Little Mermaid through Monday, Sept. 4.