By LARRY ADAMS
A Seat on the Aisle
“The fifth time’s the charm. I can feel it.”
Theater can be amongst the most powerful of all art forms. Whether elevating its audience through dramatizations of heroic acts of courage and the triumph of the human spirit or plumbing the depths of the soul in its search for meaning and its place in the universe, theater, at its best, can challenge us to explore and appreciate the most profound complexities of the human condition.
On the other hand, sometimes you just wanna watch a silly comedy.
If the latter is the mood you’re in, then Carmel Community Players is serving up just the thing for you this Thanksgiving season with its production of Four Weddings and an Elvis, now playing on stage at the Cat Theatre in Carmel.
The plot, such as it is, is … well, pretty much summed up in the title. Indy community theater staple Veronique Duprey plays Sandy, the operator of one of those Las Vegas wedding chapels offering quick – perhaps too quick – opportunities for locals and out of towners alike to get hitched. Over the course of the play’s breezy, two-hour runtime, we are treated to a look at a series of these hasty, tacky and perhaps ill-considered matrimonial services.
The first act contains the weaker two of the four vignettes which make up the play: two young lovers, each on the rebound from divorces, race toward marriage for all the wrong reasons; a couple of haughty Hollywood has-beens attempt to reignite their fame while parading their superficiality and out-sized egos back and forth across the stage in stereotypical form. Though the cast gamely does its best with what it’s been given in these early scenes, the material here is rather pedestrian – the premises and jokes are serviceable in a 1990s Saturday Night Live skit sort of way but are neither breaking new ground nor particularly clever.
Fortunately, things pick up after the break. In a love connection between a dweeby postal worker and a foul-mouthed ex-inmate (excuse me, “convict”), Jacob Bradford and Kelly Melcho give us the unlikeliest of all the couples on stage. Playing the most absurd of this rather large cast of characters, they also somehow manage to come off as both the most believable and the most endearing – a real tribute to their acting chops. First-time (or at least close to it) actor Gregory Roberts complements the pair quite nicely with a fine performance as another roughneck con, but one with the proverbial heart of gold.
One of the most difficult – yet most essential – parts of any production, whether drama or comedy, is sticking the landing. It can truly make or break the show. Amazingly, despite the disparate and seemingly unrelated first three vignettes, Four Weddings and an Elvis – with the help of this cast and crew – somehow pulls it off, giving everyone both onstage and off a hilarious and satisfying ending. Well, maybe not quite the ending. A surprise (ah, heck, it was inevitable, really) cameo provides a “royal” cherry on top of the evening’s festivities.
Encore award-winning director Nicole Amsler has assembled a fine team of actors and crew to mount this production. Performances, as is often the case in large-cast community theater productions, are a bit uneven and occasionally succumb to that greatest of all theatrical temptations, overacting (this can work in a comedy, and admittedly does so here more often than not – but can also be distracting enough at times to suck the audience right out of it); however, the cast of this particular production more than makes up for it by engendering a great deal of audience goodwill. They are clearly having fun with the material, and it’s contagious. Standouts tonight include the aforementioned Ms. Melcho, as well as Audrey Duprey in a surprisingly nuanced and controlled performance as Bev, the hopeful bride-to-be. Honorable Mention also goes to leading lady Veronique Duprey, not least of which for her command of Klingonese. One quibble only, perhaps a reflection of my age more than anything else: volume. This seems to be a problem primarily for the guys for some reason. A little work on projection, gentlemen, would go a long way. Believe me, I’m a bit of an expert on this – I’ve been on the receiving end of this critique from directors probably more than anyone else in community theater history.
Bottom line: this ain’t Shakespeare, or even Neil Simon. But if you’re looking to just kick back with some popcorn, tune the world out and turn your mind off for an evening of laughs, Four Weddings and an Elvis may just be worth saying “I do” to.
Four Weddings and an Elvis continues at the Cat Theatre in Carmel through Nov. 23. Tickets can be obtained by visiting carmelplayers.org.
Read more great play reviews from A Seat on the Aisle at asota.wordpress.com.