From the opening bars of the intro music, there is a certain feeling of anticipation as you wait for Pine Tree Players’ actors to hit the stage.
Like the title itself, The Odd Couple’s intro music is something of a tantalizing retro throwback and when it starts, you want to see how the local theatre company handles playwright Neil Simon’s time-honoured production from the 1960s.
So many are so familiar with productions of The Odd Couple on stage or on the tube and you find yourself wanting to meet PTP’s Oscar and Felix.
Fortunately, you won’t be disappointed.
The Odd Couple will be staged at the Canmore Miners’ Union Hall, April 8-10 and April 14-16.
As director Elizabeth Green said, staging a much-loved and oft-viewed play like The Odd Couple presents its own challenges, including the fact it is so much-loved and oft-viewed.
The principle actors, therefore, need to take ownership of their characters and Evan Burr (Oscar Madison) and Larry Whan (Felix Ungar) do just that. In fact, Burr and Whan have something of the mannerisms and voice inflection of the originals, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.
The Odd Couple, of course, is a play about relationships, the relationship between Oscar and Felix, of course, but also of the relationships between husbands and wives and between friends.
The Odd Couple opens at the poker table in Oscar’s eight-room apartment. The apartment (set by Dea Fischer) is a reflection of its owner; strewn with laundry, beer cans, potato chips and aswirl in cigarette and cigar smoke.
The apartment is a true bachelor/divorced guy’s pad. As a whiny Roy (Rob Murray) points out in an Eastern Seaboard accent, the fridge doesn’t work, the air conditioning doesn’t work and the food and drink is lukewarm.
The poker table also features a henpecked Vinnie (Simon Steele), who goes on and on about when he has to get home to his wife and the quick to anger Speed (newcomer Christopher Yee) who appears generally angry with everything that’s going on – at the poker table and with life in general.
With a wide range of facial expressions and gesticulations, Gerry McAuley as Murray the cop is hilarious while complaining about being henpecked as well.
The first act of the play is something of an emotional roller coaster as first Felix is missing from the weekly poker game, then his wife calls to say they’ve broken up, leaving the guys to think the worst, then he shows up and says he took a bunch of pills while in Oscar’s bathroom.
Oscar takes pity on the newly-dumped Felix and offers him a home, for a while.
After taking Oscar up on his offer, Whan shines as the weepy, neurotic, allergy-ridden Felix. As a high maintenance roomie, Felix is nicely countered by Burr’s laid back but slovenly, Oscar.
The move, of course, spells the end of the weekly poker games, as Speed and Roy in particular can’t take Felix’s influence on Oscar’s lifestyle.
While Oscar and Felix play well off the supporting cast, including Martha McDairmid and Allanah Bellai as the sexy, suggestive Canadian Pigeon sisters, Gwendolyn and Cecily, from upstairs, the interaction between the two leads when alone is most interesting.
Being the two are at such extreme ends of the scale, roomie-wise, tensions build as Felix’s uber neatness drives Oscar crazy. Worse yet, a date with the Pigeon sisters proves to be a disaster, for Oscar, when the pair are drawn to the sensitive Felix.
On the other hand, Oscar’s constant failure to to clean up after himself causes Felix distress.
In the end, what the audience witnesses is Felix becoming less neurotic and less guilty about his marital breakup, while despite Oscar’s complaints about his newly neat apartment, the slob actually accepts his roomie’s tidy ways.
Tickets for The Odd Couple are $20 and are available at Second Story Books and Café Books on Main Street in Canmore.
