My overall impression
First let me say that I’m usually a comedy-drama kind of guy where characters are real and one believes in the emotional truth of those characters. Thus, I’m not automatically into skit humor UNLESS there’s a particular cleverness or intelligence or an imaginative theatricality to the staging / performance of that broad humor. Magnum Opus Theatre DOES have those qualities… this is my fourth show I’ve seen of theirs and again I guffawed through most of it. First of all, they have a high concept that works: take horribly written utterly amateurish unsolicited screenplays and then perform them with a mix of seriousness and clowning (sometimes amazingly simultaneously) live on stage. Word for word, including typos, screen directions and parentheticals. (These latter two are often performed in a story theatre way that accentuates visual puns and is when the show is at it’s most meta and silly, but silly in a good way to be clear.) While this one is probably my third favorite of the four I’ve seen, that is no diss but rather just how funny the two I hold in higher esteem. In other words, I enjoyed 97% of this one instead of 98 or 99%. The large cast is uniformly good to excellent with only one minor ensemble person being in the acceptable range. Particular strong kudos to the two leads: Mike Lanahan and Heather Schmidt who are very, very talented and funny performers.
