Effervescent performances by a pitch-perfect cast, inspired direction by a Broadway National Tour vet only just out of his teens, and a script so fresh and funny, you’d hardly guess it was written over a hundred-twenty-five years ago combine to make Glendale Centre Theatre’s in-the-round staging of Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt the year’s first bona fide comedy hit.

Reset by director Carter Thomas from the Gay Nineties to the Roaring Twenties (the 1920s that is), Charley’s Aunt transports us back east to Yale University (Oxford in the British original) where all-American undergrads Jack Chesney (Ethan Leaverton) and Charley Wykeham (Anthony Lofaso) find themselves head-over-heels in love with their respective sweethearts Kitty Verdun (Autumn Harrison) and Amy Spettigue (Lauren Faulkner).

Indeed, there’s nothing our two heroes want more than to propose to their ladies fair, but there’s a hitch: Neither girl is willing to visit Harry and Charley’s campus digs without a female chaperone on hand.

Fortunately, Jack receives word that Charley’s wealthy widowed aunt, Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez, is arriving from Brazil just in time to be of assistance.

Unfortunately, news arrives that Donna Lucia won’t be arriving till a few days from now.

Luckily for the boys, their English schoolmate Lord Fancourt Babberley, aka “Babbs” (Ethan Haslam), just happens to be appearing in a school play in female drag, and having just tried on his costume when Kitty and Amy return, who best to pretend to be Charley’s aunt than you know who?

Adding to the madcap mix are the undergrads’ eveready servant Brassett (Richard Malmos), Jack’s father Sir Francis Chesney (Howard Lockie), Amy’s uncle Stephen Spettigue (Shawn Cahill), Babbs’ dream girl Ela Delahay (Angie Portillo), and the real Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez (Kara Gibson), whose only slightly delayed arrival presents the boys with not one but two aunts to juggle in so fresh and frothy a romp, it could almost have been written yesterday.

It helps enormously that director Thomas, just ten years old when he played Mary Poppins’ Michael Banks at the Ahmanson ten years ago, proves the most talented of helmers, not only eliciting ten bight and breezy performances but proving himself a master at staging physical comedy to all four sides of Glendale Centre Theatre’s arena stage.

 It helps just as much that Haslam (leading man handsome as Babbs and the most improbable of drag queens as “Donna Lucia”), Leaverton’s ever so engaging Cheney, and Lofaso’s just as appealing Jack are everything a Charley’s Aunt fan could wish for, and slapstick champs to boot.

Faulkner, Harrison, and Portilo are all three vivacious charmers as the object of their young men’s affections, Cahill makes for the scene-stealingest of would-be lotharios (as blissfully unaware of the phony Donna Lucia’s actual gender as Joe E. Brown was of Jack Lemmon’s in Some Like It Hot), and Malmos’s wry, fourth-wall breaking Brassett and Lockie’s silver-foxy Sir Francis are absolutely terrific as well.

Last but not least, stepping into the real Donna Lucia’s shoes for the production’s first week only, Gibson lights up the stage like nobody’s business as the most sparkling and sassy of millionairesses.

Bumping Charley’s Aunt ahead from Victorian Oxford to 1920s Yale not only means no need for British accents save Haslam’s just-right posh vowels, it allows costume designer Angela Manke to outfit the cast quite gorgeously in flapper-era finery.

Production designer Tracey Thomas gives us just enough set pieces to take us from dorm to garden to living room, all of them expertly lit by Paul Reid.

Bridget Pugliese is assistant director. Brenda Dietlein is executive producer. Kelly Flynn is production manager and Rebecca Thomas is production assistant. Megan Blakeley takes over as Donna Lucia beginning January 10.

Despite having just one hit play to his name, Brandon Thomas has rightly earned his place in theatrical history with the timeless classic Charley’s Aunt, and director Carter Thomas (presumably no relation) knows how to do his namesake’s chef-d’oeuvre divine justice. Together with a couldn’t-be-better cast, they open Glendale Centre Theatre’s 2020 season with New Year’s fireworks pizzazz.

Glendale Centre Theatre, 324 N. Orange St., Glendale.
www.glendalecentretheatre.com

–Steven Stanley
January 3, 2019

Tags: Brandon Thomas, Glendale Centre Theatre, Los Angeles Theater Review