A successful run of shows showcasing different kinds of light comedy has revitalized Laguna Playhouse in 2023.
Now, with “The Angel Next Door” — an accomplished farce with a highly polished new gloss applied to a 100-year-old plot — the bromide “laughter is the best medicine” is again on display in Laguna.
Taking on directing a show for the first time since becoming the theater’s artistic director in May, David Ellenstein makes adroit plate spinning seem seamlessly easy.
“The Angel Next Door” has five sets of doors on its appealing set, all beckoning to be slammed for fun, but it is tight pacing and verbal dexterity that Ellenstein and his skilled six-person cast delight with.
This play world premiered in September at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach and has transferred very well up the coast.
Kudos also go to author Paul Slade Smith. Commissioned by Ellenstein, writer/actor Smith chose to adapt a plot from 1924 called “Play at the Castle.”
There is wise precedence for adapting the work from Hungarian — and, briefly, Hollywood — writer Ferenc Molnar: lauded British playwrights P.G. Wodehouse and Tom Stoppard each tapped this source material for different plays.
In an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Smith said, “I’ve always wanted to adapt something, to take one of the old plays and have somebody else do the hard work of figuring out the plot. I just get to work on the jokes.”
Smith is clearly selling himself short about just writing the jokes. Nothing dies faster on stage than farce when it is forced and labored.
And while the secret sauce here will forever remain unknown to audiences — somewhere in gestation between Smith’s writing, director’s Ellenstein’s rehearsals and Smith’s rewriting — “The Angel Next Door,” is full rollick.
Set in 1948, in a Newport, R.I., mansion, the show is centered on the frenzied professional and romantic offstage doings among five upper crust, la-di-da theater types.
They are offset by the deadest-pan delivery, thickest-accented house maid ever fictionalized from somewhere in the wilds of Eastern Europe.
Comedy, as they say, ensues.
“The Angel Next Door” is a vividly meta show with self-referential asides ever building on and folding into events on stage.
Reading about the previous versions, it appears at least some of this was in Molnar’s original plot. But Smith has cheekily and efficiently modernized lines and patter.
Being an actor, Smith declared he consciously set out to give all of his performers plenty of opportunities for antic behavior and that is evident. More importantly, though, Ellenstein and Co. are sophisticated enough not to chew up the (nice) scenery by hamming up performances so much as letting them organically explode as the plot dictates.
And while there are far more than a fair showing of knowing winks, nods and flat out fourth wall-breaking declarations to the audience, it’s in equally meta fashion: after all, they do so to an audience they simultaneously pretend is not there.
Confusing in the moment? Not at all. Successful? Oh, yeah.
There is no mystery about the performances here: these are accomplished actors reveling in their chances. Two performances beg for singling out.
While we only hear him in Act 1 before finally seeing him after intermission, Thomas Edward Daugherty as the (extremely well-named) Victor Pratt, takes a well-known type — the nitwit self-involved actor — and conveys his bumptious combination of ego and eternal confusion not so much through predictable voice and double-takes, but marvelous facial calisthenics and physical gestures.
There are several predicaments Pratt slowly becomes aware of. Dawning realization raced across Daugherty’s face, puzzled confusion slowly changing in his expression to something approaching the 20-watt amount of self-knowledge Pratt can muster.
Equally, Daughtery/Pratt deeply taps this same self-absorption with reflexive and faint semi-bows during a staged rehearsal of sorts, beaming to his imagined audience … the natural self-absorbed reactions of a fatuous ham gleaming in an imagined limelight.
Erin Noel Grennan as Olga the maid has the unfair advantage with so many laugh lines written to land from her mouth. But Grennan earns them with a pliant comic, baleful mask of resigned resentment, plus an accent that isn’t quite as severe as Natasha from the old “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons but headed there.
That’s fine, but what really elevates the performance comes later when Grennan/Olga unexpectedly grows and flowers as events reach their culmination. Somehow, the actress both keeps dubious Olga still in place, but also reveals her emotional depths. Her exit line, a fervent and honest cry of self-knowledge mock despair, both shakes her to the core and also knocks out the (real) audience!
Early in Sunday night’s opening act, Olga dourly pronounced “OK, I am going,” only to be confronted by a stuck door. After a slight tussle yanking it open, she declared in even more adamant character voice, “I am NOW going!”
The ad-lib busted up the (real) audience, earning even a fleeting character-breaking appreciative grin from another actress.
Spend time at this show and you’ll appreciate how well everything else operates so perfectly well.
‘The Angel Next Door’
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of a possible 4)
Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach
When: Through Nov. 5. 7:30 p.m., Wednesday-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 5:30 p.m. Sundays. Added performances at 2 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26 and at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 31. No 5:30 p.m. performance on Sunday, Nov. 5.
Tickets: $45-84
Information: 949-497-2787; lagunaplayhouse.com
