Review: Georgetown Palace Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong

The Play That Goes Wrong, written by Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer, is a farce that takes place on the opening night of an overly ambitious 1920s-style murder mystery. The play is being performed by a fictional, accident-prone amateur troupe, the Cornley Drama Society, who experiences technical mishaps, minor miscues, and multiple missed lines during the production that quickly escalate into all-out mayhem and the potential for loads of laughs at the actors’ expense. Clearly, it’s a troupe with “What’s the worst that could happen?” as its vision statement and “The show must go on!” as its motto.

First gaining notoriety in 2012 as a one-act play that premiered in London, the show achieved worldwide success as a two-act production for a 2017 Broadway run. The thing is, any kind of success seems to defy the odds, for most of us have long outgrown this flavor of frivolity, with its core of inept actors playing serious characters poorly and its low-hanging fruit that finds those characters mindlessly and repeatedly slipping on proverbial banana peels. I admit to occasionally loving me some Three Stooges and, sure, malfunction can be funny, but the idea of two hours of sustained slapstick and silliness had me going into this production with apprehension.

As the play within the play starts, wealthy Charles Haversham (Benjamin Meaders) lies dead on the couch in the family home. Everyone – his brother Cecil (Hayden Smith), his fiancée Florence Colleymoore (Mikah Mazza), her brother Thomas (Ross Milsap), and the butler Perkins (Leslie Hethcox) – is a suspect according to Inspector Carter (Stephen Quinn). As the play unfolds, each suspect is interrogated until the murderer is revealed.

But just before any of that, once the house lights go down, the stage lights mistakenly and briefly come up to reveal an actor crawling across the stage to the couch, where he is to be the dead Charles Haversham. His exposure is a funny if tired bit of business, but it becomes hilarious upon his deer-in-headlights reaction to being caught. The play continues in this vein, as if the playwrights and the good folks at Georgetown Palace Theatre had studied physics between drama classes and put Newton’s third law of motion – that every action results in an equal and opposite reaction – into play.

Under Ron Watson’s direction and traffic control, this production’s well-rigged and well-executed malfunctions come courtesy of designers Justin Dam and Ron Watson (scenic), Faith Castaneda (lighting), Justin Anderson (sound), and Cynthia Overton (costumes), and fight choreographer Tobie Minor has his say when malfunctions of the flying and falling nature turn physical. But the show’s highlights come as simple yet spectacular reactions to the mayhem, including Quinn’s unwavering dumbfoundedness; Hethcox’s growing exasperation turned full-on surrender; and Smith turning their character’s awkward cluelessness into hilarious opportunities to break the fourth wall to brazenly claim credit for every laugh. Milsap’s increasingly dramatic spit takes are also fun, as are Nick Riley’s and Morgan Urbanovsky’s antics as the sound/lighting guy and stage manager, respectively, who are given the opportunity to portray the sexy Florence when the original actor is rendered unconscious.

Not everything in the script or onstage works – and, quite frankly, two acts of farce does, at times, seem repetitive and tiresome. But thankfully, Newton’s first law of motion – inertia – never makes it onto the stage, and this production is still exhaustingly funny, even if it is occasionally just plain exhausting.

Georgetown Palace Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong

This article appears in February 17 • 2023.