



Those who have missed the mediocre, midcareer plays of quip-happy Neil Simon will be thrilled with the California Suite that brings the curtain down on The Winter Park Playhouse's inaugural season. It's a polished production that caters to the playhouse repertory company's strengths.

But it's a vivid reminder of what a hack Simon became in those long, lucrative years between The Odd Couple and Lost in Yonkers. Simon became so bored with the work that he started stealing from himself. This Suite is a wan, West Coast inversion of his early success, Plaza Suite.

Four scenes, four actors, five couples, all quarreling, loving, lying and one-lining their way in and out of Room 203 at the famed Beverly Hills Hotel.

"You drive everywhere out here?" New Yorker Hannah (Heather Alexander) snaps to her California ex, William (Roy Alan).

"Pretty much."

"Even to your car?"

And so on. Simon used the play, rendered into an unwatchable 1978 movie featuring Alan Alda, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau and Richard Pryor, as an apology for his own selling out and "going Hollywood."

Why did William move to L.A.?

"I went sane," he retorts.

And so on.

There's a funny scene involving a husband trying to hide the hooker in his room from his just-arrived wife. Director and star Michael Edwards plays it so well you might not notice how trite the situation is and how absurd the conclusion are.

Alan and Alexander are slightly less interesting in the "Oscar night" scene, about a British Oscar nominee and her gay husband. Both do their best work as drunks in the conclusion to that nightlong complaint.

And the finale, packing two feuding couples wrapping up the vacation from hell, is at least physically funny, with a lot of falling, punch-tossing and wailing.

The actors range from adequate to Edwards, who is a red-faced stitch in all of his scenes. Edwards and Stephanie Weaver covered a crashing mirror (not in the script) on opening night with the wit of old pros.

The intimacy of Laurie Greene's set both captures the true nature of hotel rooms and lessens the tedious stage business of stomping back and forth that slows down a lot of stage comedies. It's a small theater, which puts the funny business right in the viewer's lap.

But with most of Simon's mid-catalog relegated to places such as The Little Theatre of Larimore, N.D., you have to question why a new company in a big city would dredge up something this tired in an effort to make a first impression. At $28 a ticket, it would be nice to sample something just a tad edgier, or at least less familiar. This is dinner theater without the buffet line.

And judging from the third of the opening-night audience who arrived late, that "go our own way" 7:30 curtain time in a city of 8 p.m. play openings isn't working out, either.

Still, Simon has his fans, and I suppose somebody needs to be doing this stuff. And if The Winter Park Playhouse reaches a theater audience who has been abandoned by the more daring companies, more power to it. The group's California Suite works about as well as it ever did. And next season, promising the musicals Pete 'n' Keely and The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd and The Last Five Years, shows just a tiny bit more imagination. Not a hotel-room set in the bunch.

Copyright © 2021, Orlando Sentinel