Susan Granger’s review of “One Man, Two Guvnors” (Music Box Theater: 2011-2012 season)
Highly recommended for those who love to laugh, this frantic British music-hall farce, set in seedy Brighton in 1963, revolves around hefty and perpetually hungry Francis Henshall (James Corden) who seeks to improve his financial situation by going to work for two different people at the same time.
Obviously, his two employers (a.k.a. ‘guvnors’) aren’t aware that they’re sharing the same blathering, bungling manservant. Indeed, Rachel Crabbe (Jemima Rooper) is far too busy impersonating her recently-killed twin brother Roscoe, while smug Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris ,who murdered Roscoe, is Rachel’s posh lover.
It’s a giddy tour-de-force for English comic star James Corden, who last appeared on Broadway as the fat kid in “The History Boys” and reprised his role in the film. As the scheming fool, his cheeky gluttony is as palpable as is his flair for slapstick clowning and improvisational comedy, adapted to fit any plot twist that comes along. In the second act, he’s matched, merry pratfall-for-pratfall, by Tom Edden as a bumbling, almost blind, 96 year-old waiter with an erratic pacemaker. The rest of the cast includes Claire Lams as a lovelorn dimwit, Daniel Rigby as her self-consciously leather-clad thespian fiancé, Suzie Toase as a buxom bookkeeper with Trevor Laird and Fred Ridgeway as former convicts-turned-con men.
Satirically devised by Richard Dean, who adapted it from Venetian Carlo Goldoni’s “The Servant of Two Masters,” it’s staged with silly, mistaken identity abandon by Nicholas Hytner, Artistic Director of Great Britain’s National Theatre, and Cal McCrystal, who is credited for the ‘physical comedy.’
In the late 18th century Italian Commedia del’Arte style, it introduces familiar stock characters, like Corden’s ‘harlequin,’ and includes earthy, jesting interaction with unwitting theatergoers. Providing a musical introduction and punctuating the action, there’s an on-stage, four-piece skiffle band, punningly called The Craze, performing Grant Olding’s original songs and playing an eclectic assortment of banjos, guitars, xylophones, washboards, jugs and squeeze-ball horns. Mark Thompson’s sets and costumes suit the lightness of mood and the middle-class seaside resort town perfectly.
Not since Monty Python and “Noises Off” has there been this kind of great, raucous fun!