An impenetrable farce field surrounds the local theater scene at the moment. Good luck trying to get through it with your funny bone unscathed.
The Victorian Playhouse stages “No Sex Please, We’re British,” and the current “My Husband’s Wild Desires Almost Drove Me Mad.” Spotlight packs ’em in for an extended “Run for Your Wife,” then wisely launches right into the sequel, “Caught in the Net.”
These crowd-pleasers are as incredulous as their appeal is obvious: saucy scripts loaded with clever puns and sexual innuendo. There’s lots of door-slamming, mistaken identities and physical comedy … but what we really love is to see them sweat. Our protagonists are primarily (but not always) British, which means we’re either laughing at the nebbish whose motor is getting cranked for the first time, or with the antithetical lothario whose utter lack of repression sets him against the pervading moral superiority surrounding him.
Each of these plays could be subtitled, “That’s a fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into!” These are mindless romps that make a hot summer night pass painlessly. And that draws crowds.
But by the time Golden’s Miners Alley Playhouse opened “Not Now, Darling” (like “Run for Your Wife” from the ubiquitous Ray Cooney), I thought, “Not another one.” This sauce is so saturated. This can’t still be funny.
Turns out, it can. It’s maybe even the funniest of the bunch. It’s also banal and redundant and needlessly complex. But the naughty shenanigans are so terrifically performed, it overcomes (nearly) all obstacles. The one it can’t: The 2-hour, 20 minute run time is 20 minutes longer than this flaccid premise warrants.
But plot and premise are entirely incidental in Cooney comedies. He can take any type of character and simply make him suffer for our amusement.
Here we’re at a London fur salon, where the co-owner is pursuing a married female customer with the promise of a discounted fur, so he makes his partner handle his tigress and her imposing husband’s sale.
Soon several scorching young women are tossing clothes out the window
like it’s a ticker-tape parade, or hiding in closets for hours, or similarly behaving with utterly implausible abandon.
But it’s a hoot because of the top-notch cast assembled by director Richard Pegg, headlined by Christian Mast. This guy is either a brilliant actor, seriously damaged … or both.
As the awkward sidekick Arnold Crouch, Mast channels Stan Laurel, Felix Unger, Robert Morse, Dick Van Dyke. You name it: He makes you laugh with the movement of his body or a fluctuation in his voice. But blink, and he’s freakish Raymond from “Rain Man.”
Mast is astonishing, a savant who’s painfully adept at being awkward. Yet he makes Arnold’s twisted, tormented self endearing to the audience. I can’t imagine you learn all that in schools.
Robert Kramer makes all the obvious choices as playboy partner Gilbert Bodley, but a quartet of scantily clad ladies will have eyebrows arching higher than that painted M on the mountain next door.
Seriously, when Janelle Christie entered as the tart Janie wearing faux, skin-tight leopard, a guy yelled, “Mama!” You can imagine what happened when Janie actually stripped, refusing to leave without her promised fur.
Throw in Vanessa Bowie, Denise Perry-Olsen and an enchanting Brit newcomer named Lubna, and let’s just say Arnold has his hands full – of underwear – for much of the second act.
I faded at the end of a too-long first act, wondering whether this farce may (always) be with me. But the second act won me back with general silliness and a host of shining supporting characters among an 11-person ensemble.
What I noticed most was the consistency of laughter and the engagement of the audience until the end. And we’re talking all-out guffaws, not your more muted “theater” laughs.
Clearly they have not reached their fill of the farce.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Not Now, Darling”
COMEDY | Miners Alley Playhouse, 1224 Washington Ave., Golden | Written by Ray Cooney and John Chapman | Directed by Richard Pegg | Starring Robert Kramer | THROUGH AUG. 5 | 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays | 2 hours, 20 minutes $18-$20 | 303-935-3044,
