The Game’s Afoot @ CPH 11/30/11
Reviewed by Laura Kennelly
Need another holiday party? Come visit actor William Gillette’s Victorian castle and indulge in a light-hearted look at theatre people at play in The Game’s Afoot (or Holmes for the Holidays) by Ken Ludwig at the Cleveland Play House (World Premiere!). Oh yeah, there may be murder — but the results are comic as Gillette (based on a real actor famed for playing Sherlock Holmes who did, indeed, build a grand castle in Connecticut [that one can still visit today]) tries to act like Holmes when faced with a dead body. (Don’t you love parenthetical remarks? Editors usually hate them. Too bad. This play calls for them.)
Donald Sage Mackay (as Gillette) leads the zany characters whom he calls friends into one comic escapade after another as they attempt to deal with less than merry Christmas events in the story Ludwig has spun for them. Two uninvited guests turn what would have been a boring house party run by and for world-weary famous actors into a melee of fun: theatre critic Daria Chase (hilariously played by Erika Rolfsrud and, of course, my favorite [how often do critics get into the play, I ask? Not nearly enough!]) and Inspector Harriet Goring (who sweetly and somewhat blindly does her job).
Clever sound effects (James C. Swonger, sound designer) at the beginning draw the audience into the show even before the red curtains part to reveal the set (our hero has just finished a show and is giving bows [and we are his “audience”] when all mayhem breaks out). After that all the action takes place in the drawing room of the castle (that includes a disappearing bar) and the requisite number of entrances needed for a multi-door farce. It’s a gorgeous set (designed by Daniel Conway) that garnered its own applause when the curtains opened. Director Aaron Posner makes sense of the complicated plot that requires a zany pace (could have been a touch more frantic, but by now it’s likely faster than it was on opening night).
Although the story is sophisticated (murder, sex) the presentation is suitable for older children (but this is not the Play House’s previous Christmas Story [a show about kids and Cleveland-type families]; it’s more about the super famous or rich and it’s so much fun to laugh at them from balcony seats that it makes a nice change of pace.)
The Game’s Afoot continues until Sat 12/24 in the Allen Theatre (gorgeous new space) at Playhouse Square.
[Pictured: A special guest (center, Erika Rolfsrud) makes a grand entrance on Christmas Eve in the Cleveland Play House production of Ken Ludwig’s “The Game’s Afoot (or Holmes for the Holidays),” directed by Aaron Posner, on stage in the Allen Theatre at PlayhouseSquare, November 25 – December 24, 2011. Also pictured, from left: Rob McClure, Patricia Kilgarriff, Eric Hissom. Photo credit: Roger Mastroianni.]
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.
Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.