Review: 'Proposals'

Acting as a narrator, Sharon Lochan gets more than her share of zingers, playing the family's wisecracking maid. She too has her baggage. A boyfriend who ran off some seven years earlier now re-appears hoping to resume their former relationship.

She is also seriously concerned about the health of her employer, and with good reason. Burt, played by Mike Hiller, has already suffered one heart attack. In truth he suffers from a broken heart over the wife who left him for a new life in Paris.

She returns chiefly to make an attempt to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Josie. In this role Cari Haim gets to play a range of emotions: warm and loving with her eavesdropping father; cold and distant with her globe-trotting mother (Janice Hanson); and flirtatious with an ex-boyfriend (David August.)

Though he appears late in the first act, Len Silvini playing Vinnie a malapropic Italian doofus, comes close to stealing the show with his swagger. The lunch sequence where he matches wits with Conrad McCallum as Josie's jilted fiancé is a comic highpoint.

Like many Neil Simon scripts, this one seems to run down as the one-liners give way to mawkish sentimentality in the final scenes but here the characters are played with such sincerity that the play never loses its focus.

Mark Nathanielsz has staged the show in a way that makes even the most outrageous sequence – a funeral for a bird – come across with a sense of realism. Heightened realism, actually as the dialogue is delivered at a rapid pace.  It may not be Simon's most insightful script, nor one of his most heartfelt but it is very funny and as presented by Amicus Productions enlivened by some fine performances.

Amicus Productions presents Neil Simon's Proposals at Fairview Library Theatre Wednesday through Saturday evening at 8 PM.  For tickets call the box office:  (416) 860-6176.

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