by Roxy Arecco. @roxyarecco.
NEW YORK, NY - Beloved Off-Broadway comedy The Play That Goes Wrong went wrong last night, ultimately forcing the mad cap show, in which a local production faces an increasing number of slapstick mistakes throughout the night, to go right, sources confirmed.
“That was our new intern, Kelly,” explained stage manager Paula Miller. “She just wanted to do a good job because she needs credits for her producing minor and she got fired from Telsey last semester. Still, almost everything went right - boards weren’t falling, fires weren’t starting. Everyone was exactly where they should be, and it was awful.”
The troubles began even before the curtain rose. The show’s Playbills, normally printed off-kilter on purpose, were perfectly centered with the title in the middle of the cover. Little did the intern know, this small mistake set up the entire performance for failure, or success, depending on which way you look at it.
“The stagehands saw the programs and assumed that no mistakes were to be made that night,” noted set designer, Max Barton. “They got to work three hours before call time unrigging all of the rigs. Then they moved precariously placed props, and reinforced the floorboards so none of them broke. The show went perfectly, and everyone hated it.”
Usually, the actors begin their performance as the audience files into the theater, “fixing” broken set pieces and attempting to find “lost dogs” in preparation for their play, Murder at Haversham Manor. Since there was nothing to pretend to fix or find, the audience simply sat in silence, waiting for the production to start - which, without the laughs, was just a murder mystery sans anything interactive.
“I loved it,” exclaimed 85-year old avid theater-goer Timothy Knox. “A poignant story about life and death. The only thing I didn’t like was that run time - it seemed pretty long and repetitive towards the end.”
The long runtime alludes to the addition of three alternate endings that the cast couldn’t decide between because they had never practiced the murder mystery part of the play before.
The production brings memory of the Mischief Theatre Company’s last major failure, or success, in the form of their debut performance of Peter Pan Goes Wrong in 2015, which became just plain Peter Pan after a short 35-year-old Lost Boy fortified all of the lift lines, claiming he was “too old to deal with this shit.”
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