The Arcadia High School Theatre Department has done it again; The Man Who Came to Dinner is an amusing comedy that offers a delightful evening of entertainment for students and adults.
Tonight’s Friday night second performance is sold out but there are a few tickets left for Saturday’s show at 6 p.m. Nov. 16 (tickets at Arcadia Stage). Those with VIP and Founders reserved seats must arrive at least 15-minutes before the start of the show Friday (6:45 p.m.) and Saturday (5:45 p.m.) or risk losing their seats.
Scott Hettrick
As always, director Steven Volpe has picked a production that allows him to showcase dozens of student actors and more than 80 students who participated in all aspects of the performance. That includes the amazing and large set backdrop that is nearly the star of the show on the huge stage of the modern new 1,200-seat Performing Arts Center.
The student star is senior Liam Swan, who had the featured role in last spring’s “The Drowsy Chaperone,” and he is once again able to draw big audience laughs even between his extensive dialogue and while mostly confined to a wheel chair by simply making hilarious gestures of delight and exasperation or expressing groans of frustration.
Supporting Liam and providing great audience enjoyment periodically throughout the play is a parade of actors who keep popping up seemingly at random, including Paean Wang as a long-suffering personal nurse to Liam’s abusive radio show star character Sheridan Whiteside whose efforts to give her patient his required regular doeses of medicine are met with disdain each time; Cody Lucas as Whiteside’s doctor and would-be author who keeps showing up at the most inopportune times and getting rebuffed by Whiteside; as well as a woman who loves to make dramatic entrances followed by bizarre pronouncements; and a couple of self-centered actreses who rate themselves much higher than their fans.
Initially during the opening night performance much of the dialogue was hard to understand due primarily to the lines being spoken too quickly. The chorus of Greek chorus-like actors dressed in black in front of the curtain before each act with a rather avante’ garde performance featuring a few students who carry on a hard-to-follow dialogue with each other seems disconnected to what happens when the curtain opens, and the initial performance that precedes Act One feels too long as the first thing the audience sees. But while the play itself about a manipulative house guest who overstays his welcome does not offer nearly as many laughs or audience engagement as The Drowsy Chaperone, it nonetheless provides plenty of entertainment and wraps up with a rowsing flurry of delightful and fun plot turns.
Once again, it’s pleasing to see the curtain call followed by Volpe introducing and bringing out all the teenage and some adult participants, for which the audience of fellow students, parents, and an impressive cross-section of the community stays and applauds in support and deserved appreciation.
— By Scott Hettrick