A Spoonful of Wine Helps The Poison Go Down: Arsenic & Old Lace at Bowie Community Theare
author: Chris Pence
Don’t drink the wine at Bowie Community Theatre! Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 classic black comedy Arsenic & Old Lace follows Mortimer Brewster, a theatre critic who comes home to 1930’s Brooklyn to announce to his beloved Aunts Abby and Martha that he’s engaged to Elaine Harper,
Everybody’s playing the game— but nobody’s rules are the same— nobody’s on nobody’s side! It may be a direct quote from one of the show’s songs, but how hauntingly true it stands to this semi-post-pandemic world we’re all trying to scrape by in as it stands. Theatre is returning, for many— despite being May of 2022— these ‘late spring’ productions are the first live-in-person performances that companies are getting to experience since closing their doors over two years ago.
As I watched this long-awaited production of August Wilson’s Fences from the Bowie Community Theatre (it was set to open in March 2020 before life got so much more… interesting), I couldn’t help recalling lines from Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”:
They f*ck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
They’re practically perfect, in every way! Almost practically perfect, that’s what we say! Mary Poppins popping up on the Bowie Playhouse Stage by way of 2nd Star Productions. Directed by Fred Nelson with Musical Direction by Sandy Melson Griese, this charming and quaint little Disney ditty is a lovely offering for the summertime. Anything can happen if you let it and they’re letting anything and everything happen on that stage; well, practically,