Room Service

By: John Murray and Allen Boretz

About the Show

When a scheming producer, 19 starving actors, a guillable young playwright and a leery investor are all holed up in the same seedy Times Square hotel room while dodging a persistent hotel manager looking for payment, ... hilarity ensues.

Notes from Artistic Director Charles Burr

It’s been awhile since we have done a farce. We’ve done some of the great American comedies in the last few years, (You Can’t Take It With You, Arsenic and Old Lace) but a door-banging, race-around-the-room, hide-as-many- people-under-the-bed-as-possible farce, well, it’s been awhile. This is one of the classics from the 1937-38 Broadway season. Directed by the legendary George Abbott and starring Eddie Albert, it ran 500 performances, which was an incredible run in depression era America.

Room Service really entered the pantheon of great farces when the Marx Brothers chose it for their 1938 feature. The film stars the three Marx Brothers (Zeppo had retired by this time to become a theatrical agent and to manufacture machine parts). It also features a very young Lucille Ball and Ann Miller.

If you want to know a little more about the story line: A nimble-witted producer, living on credit with several actors in a Broadway hotel, is desperately in need of a good script. He finds one, and, by great good luck, he also finds an angel with $15,000. The play shows how, during a hectic few days, the producer plays hide-and-seek with the angel who wants to withdraw his financial support, manages to outwit creditors, and at the very last moments puts over his play in spite of the most ludicrous and unexpected obstacles.

I love directing farce. Everything: the plot, the characters, the situation, even the furniture, are an obstacle that each character has to get around. That means fast talking, don’t just walk----run, leap the bed and accomplish the impossible. They are hard work for me and the actors---but the rewards will be great every night as the laughs echo around the dome of the opera house.

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