Martians abduct a robot. A coffee klatch picks a prize-winning floral arrangement. There’s birthday cake for a lady seated in the front row. It can only mean one thing.
The Farndale Townswomen are back at Edge.
Audiences got a kick out of the little playhouse on the balcony doing the Farndale Theater Guild doing Charles Dickens a Christmas or two ago. Well, this time, the ladies who do everything wrong, right, are doing something futuristic.
It’s a dandy of a ditty that takes them on their spaceship from the vicarage in Guildford to Mars to save Earth. Their fearless hero who leads them is a man you can’t see or hear because the actress in the role is indisposed. A luminescent fish for Pisces passes a luminescent crab for Gemini as their spacecraft sails deep space en route to The Red Planet. The action wants to be high tech, high adventure, high five. It is in fact, not quite that.
Props that aren’t where they are supposed to be, trip the ladies, bruise the ladies, bang the ladies up. Lines get convoluted into puns that aren’t fit to print. Positions suggestive to say the least, are gotten into. Laughs, loveableness and outrageous fun hang you on and just don’t let go.
This is a cast of five doing off-the-wall, British comedy that gives them permission to go ballistic.
Melanie Calderwood lifts it off as Mrs. Reece, Farndale’s sparkplug for their production and frizzy-haired Dr. Einstein in their production. Melissa Timms ignites the booster rockets as cheery, sweet Felicity in the role of the Martian, Amana, daughter of Maytag. And Kristal Thomas seems at home off the planet as valium-sedated Norah playing the can-do robot, Super-Townswoman.
Also, from a purely acting standpoint, Frank Lawler and Jane Martin do things with their faces that are absolutely priceless. Lawler’s is a question mark for perplexity, which is his character’s state of mind, generally. Martin’s can be fed up, petulant, pouting, I-don’t-want-to-play anymore; it’s a story book.
Director, Michael Kelley, has matched the cast to the material. The material matches the title by David McGillvray and Walter Zerlin, Jr. The title is: “They Came From Mars and Landed Outside the Farndale Avenue Church Hall in Time for the Townswomen’s Guild’s Coffee Morning.” The title is a mouthful. The characters are a handful. The production is a barrel full.
Of laughs.
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