Near the beginning of Self-Help, one of the main characters—a beleaguered actor married to another actor—yearns for the satisfaction of “a warm round of applause.”
Well, that’s what the cast and crew of this very funny farce deserve at the very least. One of several plays by Norm Foster that Lisa Woske has successfully directed at By the Sea Productions in recent years, this production does Foster’s material proud, and you can see why he earned his sobriquet as “the Canadian Neil Simon.”
The crowd on opening night was enthusiastic and impressed with the many one-liners that pepper the plot, which if you examine too closely is more than a little contrived . . . but that’s okay. The cast is so good you just want to keep watching what they’ll do when a dead body is discovered in the house belonging to the married couple, Cindy and Hal Savage.
It’s a comedy, so the discovery is treated almost as a minor inconvenience by the amusingly self-centered characters (thank goodness we know from the get-go that the person expired from natural causes, but that doesn’t stop the Savages from panicking and the police from muddling around).
Ed Cardoza plays the police detective so well you’d swear he will be typecast in such roles for the rest of his acting career, and Laurelle Barnett Kelty slyly and convincingly plays the couple’s agent, who always seems to be angling for more . . . of something. Jeremy Cash as Kelty’s underhanded beau and Roxane Rodnick as the ditzy maid express their underhandedness and ditzyness in myriad entertaining ways, respectively.
But none of them can top Christina Diaz and Robert Vaca as the Savages, who have great onstage chemistry. They play off each other with glee, and Woske wisely lets them go for it as they rise in the first 15 minutes of the two-hour, two-act production from actors in second-rate dinner theatre shows to multi-millionaire self-help gurus.
In this situation, however, they can’t seem to help themselves. The dead body debacle simply serves as an amusing distraction on our way to discovering whether the couple will emerge unscathed and whether everyone, including the audience, will have a happy ending.
Scenic artist Molly Cochran and sound and lighting designer Samvel Gottlieb serve the production well, and the many members of the set construction and decor crew are to be congratulated on building one of the most impressive sets for the company this season.
Self-Help is playing in Morro Bay through October 19.