Red velvet curtains, footlights, off to one side a piano topped with a vase of scarlet roses - all set up a typical British music hall. But what follows is not typical. It's a series of hilarious sketches that are thirty years old yet mostly amazingly fresh. Though I've seen them before (at FST, in fact) and heard them often (in the full glory of their literacy) on their authors' recording, I still just laughed throughout a "Good Evening" indeed.
Tall blond Steven Barron authentically presents a variety of eccentric Englishmen, from a coal miner with literary pretensions on to an opinionated shepherd giving an interview about Jesus' birth to the proprietor of a desolate restaurant called (after the only two items on its menu), "The Frog and Peach." Even more far out are characters assumed by short of stature, long of nose Tony Freeman: a one-legged man auditioning to play a movie Tarzan, and a flaming gay actor shirking his duties as a temporary domestic worker to rehearse the role of Othello.
Freeman's forte is linguistic humor, whether a quasi-Germanic operatic riff or a stage-Irish maid or a garbled speaker on "Speech Impodiments." Reminiscent of "The Babbit and the Bromide," especially in their initial "Hello," the two are yet as proficient in action as with repartee. They're impressively accompanied on the piano by Jim Prosser, handsomely done up in black tie and tails. He has a number all to himself - a concert version of "Colonel Bogey's March," whose ending is as long as the River Kwai. Technical support is all the performers - and we - could ask for.
