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Release Date:  September 2001

Article:   Over The Moon . . .

Joan Collins makes her eagerly awaited return to the British stage joined by Broadway and screen star Frank Langella in this screwball comedy by Ken Ludwig, the author of the smash hit Lend me a Tenor and musical Crazy for You.

Set in Buffalo, New York, in 1953, this hilarious play centers around George and Charlotte Benson, the stars of a touring acting company who have been together for thirty years.  Both their marriage and their careers are on the rocks. When Charlotte find out the George is having an affair with the juvenile lead, she decides to run off with their best friend and George resorts to the bottle . .  and then news arrives that a big Hollywood director is in town to possibly cast them in his next epic.

Chaos erupts as the company prepares for a matinee of Private Lives or is it Cyrano de Bergerac . . nobody knows! Ray Cooney, the master of British comedy and author/director of the West End’s newest hit, Caught in the Net - Run for Your Wife (The Sequel), directs this riotously funny play which is guaranteed to have you rolling in the aisles.

Over the Moon is a backstage farce that owes debts to Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, and Christopher Durang’s An Actor’s Nightmare and the borrowings are so overt that at times you feel you’re watching a compendium of comedies about the theater through the ages. The era is the early 50s’ and the main characters, George and Charlotte Hay, are permanently down-at-the-heels theatrical couple who are still performing old-fashioned repertory in Buffalo, New York.

They do Cyrano de Bergerac with a cast of five (more than they can afford to pay on a regular basis) and run it in repertory with Private Lives, it never seems to have occurred to Charlotte that - with a daughter in her twenties - maybe she’s a trifle too old to play Roxanne opposite her husband’s Cyrano. The couple’s theatrical narcissism is Ludwig’s primary running gag. The play is set on the morning and afternoon of the day when their daughter Rosalind, a former member of the ragtaggle troupe, returns home with her fiancé in tow, and the Hays are told that they have a chance at the leads in a new Frank Capra movie - and that the director himself is planning to show up at the matinee. Much broad-humored confusion ensues, during which - among other things - George discovers that he’s gotten a supporting player pregnant, Charlotte nearly runs off with an old suitor, George gets irredeemably sloshed, and no one, including the wardrobe mistress (Charlotte’s deaf mother) is quite sure which play they’re supposed to be performing.

Over the Moon is a champion farce, a kind of hard-sell aggressiveness that passes for hilarity and there is no doubt that the script and the performances will certainly be a crowd pleaser.

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