Playwrights: Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore . At: Oak Park Festival Theatre at Madison Street Theatre Studio, 1010 W. Madison St., Oak Park. Tickets: 708-445-4440; www.oakparkfestival.com; $20-$25. Runs through: May 6
There are multiple reasons why Oak Park Festival Theatre's production of the 1960s British comedy revue Beyond the Fringe might not inspire much confidence at first. But if you stick it out, you'll be greatly rewarded by the end.
There are errors in David Mink's director's notes in the Beyond the Fringe program. Mink misspells the name of Jonathan Miller as "Jonathon," who was one of the show's four original performer/playwrights. Mink then states that Miller returned to a career in medicine after his initial brush with fame with Beyond the Fringe, omitting the fact that Miller is best known today as a theater and opera director (a career fate he bemoaned in a whiny 2005 interview on the BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs.)
Set designer Andrew Hildner tries to create a hip 1960s abstract space with floating color panels in the tiny studio theater of Oak Park's Madison Street Theatre, but the materials look cheap and the placement makes the area feel cramped (and they were hazardous on opening night, when a couple performers stumbled into stage platforms.)
And then some might question the casting for Oak Park's Beyond the Fringe, which deviates from the original, which featured four upstart college-aged men. In Oak Park, two of the four performers are middle-aged men (Jack Hickey and Mark Richard) while a woman (Maggie Graham) has also been brought into the mix alongside only one college-age male (Chris Ballou).
Yet, despite all these potential drawbacks, Oak Park Festival Theatre's Beyond the Fringe is a comic dream for Anglophiles. You can see how Beyond the Fringe inspired Monty Python's Flying Circus with great absurdist sketches with funny play-on-words writing. And it's also a treat think of how this influential, if very 1960s period material, launched the showbiz careers of Miller alongside future famed actors Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and acclaimed out playwright/author Alan Bennett.
Mink's non-traditional casting for the show works, and the acting company all dazzle with their great comic timing and mastery of various British accents (particularly in the case of Hickey and Richard).
Richard and Ballou are particularly in fine form in the Act II sketch of a Bethlehem shepherd being interviewed by the Biblical roving reporter Matthew, while Hickey is hilariously understated as a stiff-upper-lipped patriarch having a bit of chat about his misguided notions of human reproduction. Although her roles were not written for a woman, Graham brings a great energy to the show with her exaggerated facial expressions and officious bearing.
So if you love British comedy, Oak Park Festival Theatre's Beyond the Fringe will definitely be your cup of tea. Just don't mind the initial missteps that give a negative first impression.