1660 N. McClelland – Santa Maria CA, 93454
(805) 922-4442
I’ve been many things on stage at the Santa Maria Civic Theatre. I’ve played a con man trying to swindle a blind woman. A few years ago I was a jealous husband trying to hire a hit man to murder his wife. Then I played a racist reverend, a physicist with a stutter, and finally a police inspector missing an arm and a leg last year in Young Frankenstein. This time I play a tax exile who can’t quite keep track of his sardines in Noises Off: The hardest show ever.
Noises Off is about a play called Nothing On and the actors that perform it. Most of us play two roles, the actor and the part that actor is playing. That means we need different postures, different voices, and in some cases different accents depending on the line. Believe it or not, that’s not the hard part, that’s actually the fun part. The hard part is that we’ve got to do all of that while running and back forth with a plate of sardines.
You see, in a normal run-of-the-mill play the actors learn their lines and they move around a little bit on stage while saying them. Maybe you lean on a table or sit gingerly on the edge of an old couch, but mostly you try not to stand in a line and you remember to turn your torso to the audience so the audience can see you better. Noises Off is not a normal play. In a normal play, if something breaks on stage or someone falls down or forgets a line, it’s a huge event. For Noises Off…well that’s the plot. In this show, nearly everything that can go wrong in a play DOES go wrong. There are stuck doors, lost contacts, wardrobe malfunctions, missing actors, forgotten lines, slippery stairs, and a bit with a cactus.
Hilariously, in the true fashion of art imitating life, this is also true for the real backstage. Now, I don’t want to give away any of the actual laughs so instead I’m going to tell you some things that happened on stage this last weekend which were definitely not supposed to happen, but in the context of this ridiculous play were seemed totally plausible.
First, we broke a plate on stage. I don’t mean it chipped, I mean it smashed on the ground in about six hundred pieces. Not a huge deal but it was also full of sardines, which flew everywhere. Instead of a collective gasp from the audience, they just laughed harder. Someone asked me after the show what our plate budget was. The director replaced these plates with plastic fish plates. One of those plates was immediately stepped and badly chipped on in the following performance. Another was knocked clean out of my hand by an axe and skidded into the audience. Don’t worry, the axe IS part of the show.
Later we broke a cardboard box on stage. No, wait, we broke TWO boxes on stage. One was flattened because Gary sat on it, the other ripped up the side. I had to repair them both with white duct tape between two shows. Speaking of those boxes, someone (*cough*…me) thought it would be a good idea to fill the grocery box with actual groceries, including a bag of flour left over from Kimberly Akimbo. The bag burst open during a performance and drenched several actors in flour. It caused our stage manager to have to mop the backstage area during the show. Not between acts, I mean while we were rushing back and forth between doors he had a mop and a bucket and was cleaning the floor under our feet.
Again, these are not actually part of the show but are such good examples of the kind of things you will see in Noises Off that the audience had no idea anything was wrong.
This doesn’t even count the actual silly things we are SUPPOSED to be doing backstage in order to make the onstage work out. We crawl on hands and knees under the window, we drop suitcases full of junk down staircases, we stick sardines down our shirts, we guzzle “whiskey” off-stage so the bottle will be empty on stage, and we throw props back and forth seconds before we rush back on. Honestly if you had a camera back stage you wouldn’t be able to tell which is the show and which is reality.
Noises Off also includes the best and most ambitious set I’ve ever seen at Santa Maria Civic Theatre. Act I takes place on stage, Act II takes place backstage, and Act III takes place on stage again. In order to accomplish this, Director Cody Fogh and his crew spent hundreds of hours building this incredible set that is almost like another character. It’s a two story monstrosity that actually rotates. You’ll really have to see it to believe it. You really can’t grasp the magic of the scene changes until you see it move with your own eyes. It’s almost worth the price of admission just to see the crew flip it around between acts.
Noises Off is a wild exhilarating ride that you won’t forget. Tickets are on sale now and we have two more weeks of this crazy mad-cap fun before we close. If you haven’t seen it yet, click the link and buy your tickets now!