What's wrong with "The Play that Goes Wrong" - MAJOR spoiler alert!

The Chief & I found ourselves in NYC over the weekend and managed to find time to see The Play That Goes Wrong.  I knew people who'd seen and loved it, found it very funny.  We didn't; yes, it had its moments, but a "gut-busting" laugh riot?  No.

Warning:  The rest of this post will be full of spoilers.

The premise is a fairly incompetent college/university dramatic society putting on a murder mystery.  Two of the "stagehands" end up getting pulled into the action, at first reluctantly, but then deciding they like it when the audience applauds for them.  The character playing Cecil is your worst ham, smiling at the audience or repeating a bit if they applaud.  Funny the first time or two, but it can get old.

As you can guess from the title, the whole play is full of one mishap or disaster after another.  In fact, the whole "plot" is merely a vehicle to carry as many actor's and tech's nightmares as possible.  This means you find yourself wondering what's going to go wrong next, and when.  As a result, pretty much every performer on stage has to be good at (sometimes very) physical comedy, which probably left most of them with a whole lotta bruises.  The cast we saw did an excellent job at physical comedy, especially Maggie Weston and Matt Walker (Florence and Cecil).  Maggie got dragged upside-down & sideways through a window in Act I, and Matt took pratfalls, executed somersaults, walked into things face first, and generally made it look as though he'd be black and blue from head to toe by the next morning.

The set includes a platform, appropriately furnished, that represents an upstairs study.  Over the course of the play the downstage end drops a few inches two or three times, while there are people standing on it.  My first thought was "Are they OK?!"  Now of course I know that there is no way such a bit of business was allowed without making completely sure they could pull it off safely.  Still, it would be so easy for something unscripted to go wrong that I couldn't relax, for the performers' sake.

There were a few moments when something would happen or someone would say something and the people on stage would pause, or they would draw out a sight gag, milking it for all it was worth.  I know it was done for comic effect, but I felt that in most cases they let it go on too long.

The performers did do a good job, but they were upstaged by the special effects of the disasters.  Those were so well staged (the shifting platform, a trick floorboard, things falling off walls, and so many more) that it's easy to see why the set won a Tony.  The engineering involved in creating those effects so they could be controlled with exquisite timing was impressive!  (We couldn't help but wonder how long it takes the crew to reset everything for the next performance.)

There were a lot of references to actor's nightmares (e.g., an actor redelivering a line, causing everyone else to repeat a scene) and tech's nightmares (a stagelight sparking as its support falls), but a whole play based almost entirely on stringing them together was a lot funnier to the people coming up with the idea than it was to at least these two members of their audience.