Rita Rudner Returns and Gets ‘Staged’ in a World Premiere Performance
In 1992, the star-studded British comedy, Peter’s Friends, was released in theaters and featured a veritable murderers’ row of U.K. talent. Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton, Stephen Fry, and Alphonsia Emmanuel played college friends reuniting at a countryside estate for a holiday weekend. It was considered a British version of The Big Chill, filled to the brim with 80s pop hits and character-driven shenanigans. (It happens to be one of my all-time favorite films from across the Pond.) It was the first produced script written by Rita Rudner, who co-starred in the film as Branagh’s American wife, and her husband/producing partner Martin Bergman. Their work was nominated for a WGA Best Screenplay Award and even earned Rudner a Best Supporting Actress win at the American Comedy Awards.
Now, more than thirty years later, Rudner and Bergman are bringing their latest collaboration to the Laguna Playhouse (their fourth) in Laguna Beach, CA. Staged, co-written and directed by Bergman, opens with a prologue during which the marriage between Broadway power couple Fenella Fennington (Rudner) and Jarvis Haverly (Mike McShane) implodes right in the middle of a stage adaptation of Cleopatra. The humiliating meltdown, sparked by revelations of infidelity, kicks off an acrimonious divorce. Twenty years later, Fenella and Jarvis are each approached by Ezra (Brian Michael Jones), an eager producer who convinces them to rejunvenate their careers by starring in a new show written by a mysterious playwright. The play-within-the-play is called Two on a Bench.
By intermission, a wrench is thrown into the pre-production of Two on a Bench when the play’s director backs out and is replaced by Katya (Annie Abrams), Jarvis’s former mistress and the catalyst for his divorce from Fenella twenty years ago. Katya is now his ex-wife looking to further her own career with this gig, but of course not all goes smoothly throughout the second act. More secrets are revealed, things get inevitably meta, and Brian Lohmann pops up in several roles, one of which is a Broadway podcaster whose audio bits act as enjoyable interludes, while Kelly Holden Bashar plays the show’s overworked stage manager who provides (and wears) Staged’s best running sight gag.
Overall, Staged treads in familiar farcical waters. The divorced-couple-forced-to-work-together dynamic is a schtick we’ve seen before in film and television. 2001’s America’s Sweethearts threw Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack together as an estranged Hollywood couple forced to make nice during a press junket for their final film. And Hulu’s just-canceled Reboot features Keegan Michael Key and Judy Greer as former costars and lovers reluctantly reunited while reprising their roles for their resurrected sitcom. However, most of the antics and broad performances in Staged resemble those you might have seen on a CBS sitcom lineup in 1995. The script by Rudner and Bergman is safe and capable enough of getting a few laughs with several delicious zingers, but a few minor hiccups leave some moments feeling a bit off.
Both Rudner and McShane are gloriously game, even though their characters border on caricature. McShane’s Jarvis Haverly comes off as an overly flirtatious relic of a bygone era on the verge of being labeled as a #MeToo perp, and he gruffly gives it his all, but it’s not all about him. Rudner revels in Fenella’s flamboyance (and fabulous wardrobe, thanks to costumer Stacey Nezda), and together, the two appear to have a good time. If only they were staged a bit better.
Staged is running now through February 12 at the Laguna Playhouse. For tickets — visit www.lagunaplayhouse.com or call 949–497–2787.
