If you look up “performance practices in the theater during Shakespeare’s day,” you will find that men played all of the female roles. Shakespeare himself toyed with this idea on more than one occasion in his plays, often writing female characters that dressed as men, and male characters that dressed as women for a variety of reasons.
This tradition of performance and playwriting certainly inspired Ken Ludwig when he penned Leading Ladies, a hilarious farce currently showing at the Great American Melodrama through April 26. The story is set in York, Pa., in 1958 and opens onto the living room of Meg (Sierra Wells) and her fiancée Father Duncan (Alex Sheets). The two are preparing for a night of theater at the local Moose Lodge, where they will see Scenes from Shakespeare performed by two British actors. Meg expresses her deep love and appreciation for the art of theater, which Duncan regards more than a little coolly, before their plans are destroyed—Duncan remembers that he loaned their only means of conveyance to the neighbor.
The thin veneer of Duncan’s put-on piety reveals that he never intended to take his poor fiancée to the theater. We also learn that he has an unhealthy interest in some inheritance money coming to Meg from her Aunt Florence, and hopes to put it to use in a church organization he plans to fund after Meg’s elderly aunt kicks the bucket.
The next scene takes us to a train car occupied by the two very actors Meg was hoping to see, Leo (Sam Hartley) and Jack (Tobby Tropper). The traveling British actors didn’t bring down the house at the Moose Lodge show and are down to their last dollar. While hopelessly scanning the local newspaper, an ad catches Leo’s eye. An elderly woman named Florence is looking for two long-lost British relations and hopes to include them in a large inheritance.
This gets Leo’s gears turning, and fueled by desperation, he hatches a plan. At the behest of Jack, Leo details a plan to convince the elderly Florence that the two actors are really her long-lost relations. Into the train car comes a new character, the delightfully ditzy Audrey (Meggie Siegrist), who is also friends with Meg. Leo is able to artfully extract information from Audrey, regarding the two long-lost relatives: how long ago they left, what they were like, and their names. It’s when Audrey reveals that the two relations were in fact women, and not men, that we learn truly how desperate these two starving artists are.
Once the disguised actors make their way into Meg and Aunt Florence’s home, the con immediately gets complicated when Leo, done up in heels and a nice floral pattern, instantly falls in love with Meg. Aunt Florence (Jacqueline Hildebrand) immediately accepts her two towering nieces with open arms, but father Duncan is more than a little skeptical of the duo. Andy Babinski plays Aunt Florence’s hilariously inept physician Doc, another powerful player in the absurdist and witty production.
Tropper and Hartley—who played hero and antagonist in the Melodrama’s previous production, Bullshot Crummond—are a dynamic duo in Leading Ladies, truly hamming up the satire of actors and theater people. Tropper and Wells offer a few interesting readings of Shakespeare together as their characters bond over the bard’s verses, which underscore the rest of the play poignantly. Sheets, Siegrist, Hildebrand, and Babinski are a powerful ensemble around the leading ladies, fleshing out the farcical story.
The evening closes with a vaudeville review at the Great American Melodrama, with the Flyin’ High Vaudeville Review following Leading Ladies. With music director Kevin Lawson at the piano, the whole group shines together in the vaudeville, which showcases the ensemble’s varied talents. Comedy, dance, music—there isn’t anything that the Great American Melodrama can’t do.
Arts Editor Joe Payne needs to brush up on the Shakespeare. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 2, 2015.