Don't Dress for Dinner

Mayfield Dinner Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada through April 5, 2015

Tickets - including dinner - starting at $75

There's farce, and then there’s good farce.

Thank goodness, Don’t Dress for Dinner at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre through April 15,  is good farce. 

In fact, thanks to French playwright Marc Camoletti, director John Kirkpatrick and a fine farcical cast, Don’t Dress for Dinner is, in fact, excellent farce!

Farce: “A comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations.” 

Farce is all about fun. It’s usually about silly affairs, mistaken identities and plots that have no pretense towards anything but fun, yet are marvellously constructed to maximize that fun.

I won’t even try to describe anything that happens in Don’t Dress for Dinner – mainly because so much happens that by the time you leave the theatre you can’t remember half the plot. 

Don’t Dress for Dinner builds on an earlier Camoletti show that ran most successfully three years ago in the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Boeing Boeing was a “prequel” starring the same two actors Kevin Kruchkywich and Dave Horak, in the same two roles – Kruchkywich as the affable but not too bright Bernard,  Horak as Bernard’s loose-limbed pal Robert.  The first time around, it was about Bernard juggling three flight attendant girlfriends, none of whom were aware of each other’s existence until all hell breaks loose.

In Don’t Dress for Dinner, Bernard is now married to Gabriella (Belinda Cornish, who played one of the flight attendants in Boeing Boeing) but is having an affair with Suzanne (Amber Lewis). Robert’s still his pal, but, rather unpal-like, is having an affair with Gabriella. Then Suzette (Rachel Bowron) is stirred into the mix … and it all carries on from there.

Centred around the Varscona Theatre in Old Strathcona, there’s long been an improvised comedy tradition in this city that has equipped many an actor to flourish in the more-scripted, but just as funny, farce tradition of the Mayfield. Director Kirkpatrick comes out of that scene, as does the always inspired Cornish. Horak – a MacEwan drama teacher by day – has honed his wide-eyed wonderment and comedic slapstick in many Mayfield comedies. 

In the “star is born” department, the multi-talented Rachel Bowron (music director of the St. Albert Children’s Theatre) brings her comedic acting chops to a new audience. As Suzette, she seamlessly morphs from cook to femme fatale. In farce, all things are possible.
There’s no one star in this hilarious show – truly it’s an ensemble.  It’s obvious the actors are greatly enjoying themselves, especially as things devolve to pies-in-the-face and carbonated water fizz sprays.

Don’t Dress for Dinner is true, inspired silliness such as regrettably never happens in real life. Consequences have nothing to do with the hilarity of the moment.  This show has the gentleness of a bygone era about it – feminism and political correctness would never allow a modern playwright to have such fun without a satiric edge.

For good ol’ plain-fashioned fun, it’s hard to beat this show.