How many times can a play go wrong? It’s so hard to count that Cincinnati Shakespeare Company has resurrected its production of the popular farce, The Play That Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Henry Shields and Jonathan Sayer. The show that ends up with the scenery collapsing and everything else in a hopeless mess proved so popular with 2024 audiences, that it’s back for another run. It opened on Friday, July 18, and will continue onstage until August 16.
It’s opening night at the Cornley Drama Society’s newest amateur production, The Murder at Haversham Manor, and the stakes have never been higher. But there’s more drama offstage than on. The cast is full of accident-prone actors, a corpse that refuses to play dead to save his life, and a knocked-out knock out of a leading lady. Rest assured that everything will go wrong every night, and the knockabout humor will bring down the house — in a good way.
Many of the actors from the 2024 production are back for more slapstick: Billy Chace and Jeremy Dubin (in the perilous photo above by Mikki Schaffner), Jared Earland, Candice Handy, Matthew Lewis Johnson and Kelly Mengelkoch. Adding to the mayhem are new performers who will be recognized by Cincy Shakes audiences: Montez Jenkins Copeland, Cary Davenport and Sylvester Little Jr. Artistic Director Brian Isaac Phillips is staging it again. To get a sense of how this hilarious tale comes apart, here’s a link [https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/cincy/cincy510.html] to my Talkin’ Broadway review from a year ago. It’s safe to assume that things will go just wrong this time around.
For tickets: www.CincyShakes.com or call 513-381-2273.