I once counted 11 doors on the set of a local play; for the moment, that was enough to persuade me that a farce was at hand. In the medium\u2019s best traditions, the doors creaked, shook and slammed with a vengeance, and the cast had the time of their lives with the schticky plot, which correctly trumped character development as the driving force behind the show. This trickiest of genres had been mastered to perfection, and everybody went home happy.
\nThere are only four doors on the set of North Coast Repertory Theatre\u2019s current “The Fox on the Fairway” (actually three, as one\u2019s just kind of a portal) \u2013 and while that in itself doesn\u2019t make this show any less an attempt at farce, it speaks volumes about playwright Ken Ludwig\u2019s comparative effort. “The Fox on the Fairway” is a decidedly weak (nay, breathtakingly anemic) pretender to the medium, lapsing into passage after passage of storytellingrather than storyshowing. Madcap replaces hilarity; speechifying substitutes for anecdote; and impulse eclipses comic timing \u2013 alas, the cast\u2019s game and honest effort is no match for a script that rarely assumes its chemistry, or any chemistry at all. For one thing, Ludwig never bothers to explain why he\u2019s chosen a country club \u2013 usually a bastion for elitist snobs who hide behind the illusion of accomplishment \u2013 as the setting for a story about the vagaries of hungry young love. He\u2019s pinpointed the color of the situation fairly well, with a huffiness surrounding the competition of the moment \u2013 the annual tilt between Quail Valley Golf Club and rival Crouching Squirrel, which the latter has won the last five years. What ensues is a game of musical chairs, with Quail Valley honcho Henry Bingham discovering one, then two, antidotes to the string of losses. Requisite improbables surround the scenario, with the eventual tournament champ losing her engagement ring down the toilet, the upshot from a side bet that involves the potential loss of Bingham\u2019s wife\u2019s antique shop and the constant bray from Crouching Squirrel director Dickie Bell, whose golf sweaters were knitted by somebody else and designed by mistake. But my, oh my, oh my; waves of subtext are strewn throughout and along the rough of each and every hole, the potential for anecdote replaced with raw outline. We\u2019re never introduced to heroes Louise and Justin (Ashley Stults and Kyle Sorrell) beyond the fact of their engagement; what brought them together is absolutely anybody\u2019s guess. Bingham is an utterly generic character, although Kevin Bailey gives him a certain authentic comportment. Brian Salmon holds his own as Dickie, but as with Bingham, the part doesn\u2019t home in on golf so much as on Dickie\u2019s ego. Jacquelyn Ritz\u2019s Pamela sits around and provides the sex jokes, while Roxane Carrasco is more than decent as Muriel, Bingham\u2019s fishwife. Marty Burnett\u2019s set fuels the tech effort, using every inch of the physical space to create a country-club swank. The rest of the tech works too, as costumer Elisa Benzoni goes out of her way to create Dickie\u2019s space-alien sweaters, of which he sadly owns more than one. But there\u2019s something breathless, indeed desperate, about this Matthew Wiener-helmed production, owing to Ludwig\u2019s insistence that his characters push themselves on us rather than collaborate on a storyline for its own sake. You can have the most magnificent set, the most telling dressage, the most authentic lighting and the most descriptive sound coloring your play \u2013 and if you fail to provide them a vehicle, they look that much worse, as they unwittingly take on lives of their own. “The Fox on the Fairway” is an exacting case in point, irredeemably falling prey to its interminably misdirected excess and terribly executed sleight of hand. Moli\u00e8re garnered a certain success with this formula amid his 17th-century French audiences\u2019 excitability \u2013 but that was then, and this is now. Take his stuff out of context, and I like him about as much as I did this show. This review is based on the matinee performance of Sept. 13. “The Fox on the Fairway” runs through Oct. 11 at North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987-D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach. $43-$50. (858) 451-1055, northcoastrep.org.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I once counted 11 doors on the set of a local play; for the moment, that was enough to persuade me that a farce was at hand. In the medium\u2019s best traditions, the doors creaked, shook and slammed with a vengeance, and the cast had the time of their lives with the schticky plot, which […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":258331,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"NCR's 'Fox on the Fairway' rarely leaves the tee","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11560],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-la-jolla-village-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}