News & Reviews

‘Fawlty Towers’ a very funny hotel

By Paul Kolas Telegram and Gazette Reviewer

STURBRIDGE— Try to imagine a hotel owner and manager with the bedside manner of Dr. Gregory House, only far more high strung and uproariously volatile. That would describe in a nutshell Basil Fawlty, the ill-mannered creation of Monty Python’s John Cleese. If you’re looking for a way to temporarily put aside that spring cleaning and laugh yourself silly, Stageloft Repertory Theater will provide you with the perfect remedy. “Fawlty Towers” demonstrated on Saturday night the proper way to serve up a farce — keep the action moving with controlled chaos and milk every predicament for all its potential. Propelled by Mark Axelson’s superbly sardonic Basil and director Ed Cornely’s astute eye for coaxing the right comic beat out of his entire cast, one barely has time to recover from one exquisitely rendered barb to the next, or hear every line of dialogue over the gales of laughter.

For those of you unacquainted with this inspired 1970s offshoot of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” Fawlty Towers is the name of a hotel in the British vacation resort of Torquay. Basil Fawlty is the brutish manager of the hotel, treating his guests with either obsequious civility or brutish disregard, depending on what he perceives as an opportunity to advance his own station in life. He’ll fawn over, for example, a Lord Melbury (played with a nice whiff of indifference by Bruce Adams), or blast Mrs. Richards (acted with perfect bombast by Cecile d’Entremont) with hilarious invective for refusing to turn on her hearing aid.

Then there is Basil’s constantly nagging wife, Sybil, essayed with a gratifying blend of suspicion and weary exasperation by Karen McGonigle. When she tells Basil, “If I find out that you won that money on a horse race, you know what I’ll do, Basil,” he pricelessly retorts, “You’ll have to sew it back on first.” The play is full of such comebacks and that singular streak of British eccentricity flaunted so brilliantly by Cleese and his Monty Python colleagues, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle.

If there is such a thing as comic relief in this zany universe, then John McGonigle takes honors as Basil’s Spanish bellboy/waiter Manuel, who questions all of Basil’s barking orders with an uncomprehending, “eh?” Poor Manuel’s command of English is, shall we say, somewhat limited, and one of the funniest bits is when Basil is trying to tell Manuel to take a guest’s suitcase up to Room 7. Finally fed up with screaming at him, Basil holds up a series of cards containing pictures of a suitcase, the number seven, and an arrow pointing up, drawing a smile of beatific understanding from Manuel and a well-earned roar from the audience.

Much of the glory of Axelson’s performance comes from the way he unfurls Basil’s amazing talent for self-sabotage, a dubious gift firing on all cylinders when two German couples arrive at the hotel for dinner and Basil recites a mantra to himself not to mention “the war” to them. Watching Axelson trying to contain himself is like the child trying vainly to restrain from laughing in church during a pious sermon, or the leak in the dam presaging the flood waters about to burst through. It’s a subversively funny scene that belongs in The Politically Incorrect Hall of Fame.

Others contributing their fair share of tomfoolery to this unhinged setting are Dave Glanville as the hotel’s mentally foggy full-time resident, Major; Ellen Elsasser, quietly splendid in the role of the hotel maid, Polly; Jeremy Woloski, adroitly juggling the characters of Danny, Inspector and Mr. Kerr; Robert Latino, shifting from the imperious Sir Richard Morris to the furiously irate Mr. Hutchinson; Neal Martel, eliciting sympathy as the cocktail-begging Mr. Wareing; and Steve Miner, etching Mr. Walt with a dry smugness. As the British would say, well done.