“I need to leave as soon as brunch is over,” I said. “I’m going to the theater.” If you’d bet me hard currency just a few years ago if I’d ever say those words in that order, I’d have bet you all I had that I never would. How posh. Brunch and the theater. But I’d bought my tickets weeks ago when they first came available and I had no intention of missing the performance.
The day dawned cool, almost autumnal and lovely. Not cold, so I didn’t need a jacket or a long-sleeved shirt, but cool enough to notice after a summer that was a daily, brutal, mind-siege. I’m not saying that fall is here, but there were portents of it – whisps of a promise – and for some of us, that is enough. At 5 a.m. Danielle and I were up and grinding coffee for brunch at Lucille + Mabel that day. Then it was off to Schlotzky’s to brew the coffee and fill the airpots. Making the coffee is a little faster with the big commercial brewer they have at Schlotzky’s. We’d begun our morning in the dark and now the day was dawning, and the people were filing into the Red Wagon for an old-school diner breakfast as we drove past and back to L&M. Another wonderful day downtown.
I dropped off the coffee and did some prep work at the bar. Five or six loads of glassware, taking out the trash from the busy night before, general cleanup to make things easier for my barback who was scheduled to be in at 8 a.m. to pre-make the Mimosas and Bloody Marys in case we get swarmed for brunch. Then it was off to pick up fruit and juices for the shift. Good thing the barback would be in early. My three and a half hours of prep work would be rewarded with an hour and a half breather before the curtain goes up on Sunday Brunch.
Except… that’s not the way it went down. I walked back into work at 9:45 – just a quarter-hour before opening – to find that my barback wasn’t there. He’d switched shifts and no one told me, and no one replaced him, and all the fruit and juices were still on the bar and in fifteen minutes the crowd would come drifting in.
And they did. A line of them ready for good food and traditional brunch drinks.
Panic.
This job is not easy. People walk in and want a brunch experience and sometimes they never consider all the prep work that goes into it. Backstage can be a mess.
We made it through the rush and I’m not complaining, but every performance behind the bar is a heart-rending mix of terror and surprise. We pulled this one off, but it could have gone much worse.
And this is all preface to what follows.
This past Sunday was “Second Sunday,” a wonderful collaborative effort by many of the Downtown Brownwood businesses to develop a habit of people coming Downtown to eat and shop and live on beautiful Sunday mornings and afternoons.
Brunch was over at 2 pm and a half-hour later Danielle and I were seated in the beautiful Lyric Theatre for a performance of Noises Off. This was our fifth Lyric play of the season, and unlike with the last several shows, the theater was not full. Eric, the theater director, informed the audience that because this performance was not one of the “big name” shows (like Footloose, Sister Act, or Grease, or Fame,) fewer people knew enough about this title and the cast and crew needed more word of mouth to get the later shows filled. Well, they should get it, because the show is well worth it. One of the best times I’ve ever had in a theater.
Noises Off is a hilarious, literally laugh-out-loud spectacle.
“Laugh-out-loud” has become a shorthand indication of nothingness. And the word “literal” has come to mean just anything at all (except literal.) People put LOL at the end of sentences now just because the latest generations don’t know how to end a sentence without sounding abrupt. The period (.) is considered rude. And the same generations will say “I literally jumped out of my skin,” which is something that almost certainly did not literally happen.
All of that is to say that when I say this show is LAUGH-OUT-LOUD funny, I mean that quite literally. It was like being in the audience in the 1950s when they had “applause” signs and they would record those laugh tracks for sometimes unfunny sitcoms. Only this was real and there were no applause signs. At one point I looked around and people were laughing so hard that their faces were red.
The show is that good.
Some quick no-spoilers background on the show…
This performance is right up my alley. I love meta stuff and the show-within-the show is something I can sink my teeth into. And that’s what Noises Off is. Let me try to explain.
Noises Off is a play about the making and performance of another play in England back in 1982. That play (within the play) is called Nothing On. Handily, in your program for this 2022 performance, you also get a program for the 1982 performance of Noises On. It’s all very fun and clever.
When the curtain rises, we see our cast rehearsing and it’s after midnight and only a half day before the first performance. Things are not going well. It’s like… well… it’s like coming into the bar with fifteen minutes to go and no one has prepped the bar or made the mimosas. The main star of the play cannot remember her cues and there are other dramas going on, including a continuing search for one of the stars of the show (Selsdon Mowbray – played here by Drex Holt) who is an alcoholic and who is known to disappear into a bottle on occasion. Suffice it to say that things are not going well. We get to see a rough run-through of the play, scenes that we will see again and again from different perspectives throughout the performance. There are constant interruptions as the cast and the director argue and bicker and some other dramas present themselves.
Also, there are SARDINES! I won’t explain that, but there are sardines. You should expect them.
When the curtain rises on the second act, we see the same set – only now we’re behind it. The whole massive set has been rotated, and now we see it all from backstage. It is four weeks into the show’s run and things have… well… developed. Romances and intrigues. Comic vignettes. Hostilities. Believe me, it is all very, very funny. And listen, I’m not a LOL guy. I just don’t do that. LOL, that is. Stoic, I am. Sometimes during this performance, I would be reviewing the audience and I thought maybe I was watching a crowd that had been told to belly laugh so hard they might need hospitalization, except that I laughed along with them because it was all that comic.
During the intermission between the 2nd and 3rd act, you are invited to stay in your seats for a few minutes and you get to watch the entire huge set rotated and reassembled so that now, you discover, you will be watching one of the final performances of the show once again from the traditional audience point of view. It’s all very magical and intimate and fantastic.
I think the whole cast is worthy of mention, but there were a few performances that I think really struck me as notable. The aforementioned Drex Holt as Selsdon Mowbray playing the burglar is a scene stealer. Throughout the whole performance, Holt elicits laughter merely by appearing on stage. Two other performers who, in my mind, deserve awards for their comic chops are Matthew McNiece as Frederick Fellows and Levi Packer as Garry Lejeune. Both of these gentlemen are masters at physical comedy, and this show required a lot of it. Frankly, I don’t know how Levi Packer was able to do it all. I was exhausted just watching him. Exhausted… and breathless from laughing so hard.
Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say… except that you should really go. Get online now or go by the Lyric Theatre for tickets. There are still four performances to go as I write this: Two each on Friday and Saturday, and one on Sunday. Don’t miss it. Fill the theater. Tell them I sent you. You’ll thank me later.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.