Arts Club's chaotic theatre production lands every laugh
The Play That Goes Wrong runs through August 16 at Granville Island with perfect precision staging intentional mishaps.
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The Arts Club Theatre Company has found the secret to making stage disasters hilarious: flawless execution of deliberate chaos.
The Play That Goes Wrong follows the Cornley Drama Society, a disaster-prone theatre troupe attempting to stage The Murder at Haversham Manor on opening night. Despite their absolute best efforts, the show implodes—the set isn't finished, actors fumble lines and butcher pronunciations, and literal fires break out. It's a mess, but a meticulously crafted one.
Director Josh Epstein told Stir that precision is required to make mishaps look accidental. The entire cast and creative team clearly took this challenge seriously. The production is hilarious largely because of the original book by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields, but Epstein and his team deserve equal credit for their incredible attention to detail and commitment.
The ensemble cast features Praneet Akilla, Pedro M. Almeida-Siqueria, Scott Bellis, Zander Eke, Ben Elliott, Genevieve Fleming, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Andrew McNee, Argel Monte de Ramos, Kelli Ogmundson, and Marco Walker-Ng. Some shamelessly ham it up—like Eke's delightfully campy Max and Fleming's spotlight-hogging Sandra—while others demand to be taken seriously as highbrow thespians, like Akilla's high-strung Chris.
Together, they deliver a genuine "show must go on" quality as they push through agonizingly delayed lighting and sound cues, confidently butcher the English language with pronunciations like "day-boo" for debut and "fack-ade" for façade, and plow ahead with original stage directions as set pieces drop around them like flies.
The real star, though, is Ryan Cormack's stunning, crumbling set design. For all these stunts and gags to go perfectly wrong every night requires what can only be imagined as a 1,000+ numbered cue track for stage managers. Mike Kovac's meticulous fight direction deserves praise for its variety and absurdity across a show that's 80 percent visual gags.
The Play That Goes Wrong runs at the Lindsay Family Stage on Granville Island through August 16.