Review: Farcical Fun Behind Every Door in Lyric Stage Boston's Boisterous NOISES OFF

Timing is everything when it comes to Michael Frayn’s 1982 “Noises Off,” a deliciously well- constructed farce chronicling the gradual collapse of a bus-and-truck touring production of a ribald play-within-the-play called “Nothing On,” with its unending parade of cast entrances and exits, slamming doors, and spare-no-laughs style.

The oft-produced comedy – first transferred from London to New York in 1983 and revived on Broadway in 2001 and most recently in 2016 – is currently being given a hilarious production by Lyric Stage Boston through December 22, fueled by a high-energy cast of nine, not to mention plates upon plates of this famous farce’s ubiquitous sardines.

There’s the aptly named Dotty Otley (Amy Barker), a past-her-prime actress with a memory like a sieve who has her own money in the tour; her much younger onstage co-star and offstage amour, Garry LeJeune (Joseph Marrella); befuddled nice guy Frederick Fellowes (Michael Jennings Mahoney); dim-bulb bombshell Brooke Ashton (Grace Experience); liquored-up veteran actor Selsdon Mowbray (Chip Phillips); seasoned professional Belinda Blair (Samantha Richert); harried stage managers Poppy Norton-Taylor (Eliza Fichter) and Tim Allgood (Dan Garcia); and Lloyd Dallas (Lewis D. Wheeler), the determined director and inveterate womanizer.

Stand-outs among the solid cast include Barker, in the role played on by marquee names like Dorothy Loudon, Patti LuPone, and Andrea Martin, on Broadway, and Carol Burnett, who played the character in a tepid 1992 film adaptation; Wheeler, who adroitly blends intensity with panache as dashing director Dallas, the role originated on Broadway by Brian Bedford and played by Peter Gallagher and Campbell Scott in subsequent revivals; and Richert, who brings welcome reason to the part of Blair, a seasoned performer with enough sense to keep her eye on everyone and everything around her. A nod, too, to Garcia, whose tasks require him to play everything from set builder and stage manager, to understudy – as Allgood, Garcia more than lives up to his character’s name.

The entire company well serves Frayn’s clever script, which involves some delightfully silly doings, the ideas for which first came to the playwright in 1970 while watching, from backstage, Lynn Redgrave performing in another farce he had written entitled “The Two of Us.” Frayn has said that, at that moment, the play was funnier from behind than in front, leading him to decide that he would one day write a farce from behind the scenes. In the play he ended up writing, each of the three acts contains a performance of the first act of the play-within-the-play.

With its title taken from the stage direction for sounds coming from offstage, “Noises Off” opens with an off-kilter rehearsal that begins with platitudes and ends in discord. In the second act, set backstage at a “Nothing On” tour stop a month later, pleasantries have been exhausted and chaos has become the order of the day. By the third and final act, the proverbial wheels have come off the tour bus and some clothes have come off the cast.

With so much happening in a show that calls for precision, director Ilyse Robbins keeps the action brisk at the Lyric, where it was previously presented in a 2004 production directed by the company’s late artistic director, Spiro Veloudos, and starring the late, much-missed Sarah deLima. Robbins wisely has her actors play it straight and not as if they are in on the farce – an essential approach in making sure the comedy is fully realized. And it mostly is, thanks to the terrific company of actors, several of whom play more than one role and deliver laughs that at one recent performance had some audience members all but convulsing.

The often frenetic action takes place on Erik D. Diaz’s impressive two-sided set that is moved not once but twice, during both intermissions, by one of the hardest-working and most capable stage crews in Boston. Seth Bodie’s detailed costume designs, SeifAllah Salloto-Cristobal’s lighting, and Andrew Duncan’s sound design also add to the frivolity.

Photo caption: A scene from Lyric Stage Boston’s production of Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off,” being presented through December 22. Photo by Mark S. Howard.

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