THE CLUB OF BROKEN FASTS


John Hughes meets William Shakespeare in Phil S. Gould’s Hollywood Fringe Festival hit The Club Of Broken Fasts, now completing its all-too-short three-performance-only reprise at the Long Beach Playhouse.

You’d most likely have to be well past retirement age not to have seen The Breakfast Club in its initial 1985 release or in the 40+ years since. (Heck, all five of its then late-teens/early-20s cast could easily make the cover of AARP magazine in 2026.)

In other words, there’s probably no need for me to summarize the original Breakfast Club script, but for anyone out there who somehow missed it, teen movie master Hughes had 1980s movie audiences spending an hour and a half as flies on the walls of a small town Illinois high school library where five very different but equally unlucky students have been assigned Saturday detention.

There’s uber-jock Andrew Clark (Scott Bartling), uber-nerd Brian Johnson (Michael DiNardo, new to the the Long Beach Playhouse production), loner freak Allison Reynolds (Mary Ann Pianka), voted-Most-Popular Claire Standish (Dina Cataldi), and delinquent stoner John Bender (Mason Conrad), none of whom would under normal circumstances be caught dead having anything to do with one another, but thanks to the wonders of Hollywood movie detention, all five are about to find themselves changed, if not for good, then at least for a day or so.

Playwright Gould pays homage to both John Hughes and the Bard of Avon by translating classic Breakfast Club lines into Elizabethan-style chit-chat.

Claire’s insistence to Vice Principal Verner that “I don’t think I belong in here” becomes “I fear that this is not my place.” John Bender’s “Oh, shit! What are we supposed to do if we have to take a piss?” gets Shakespearized into “A fear has entered into my mind. What action must we take if we must piss?” And whereas movie Claire posed the question, “Do you want me to puke,” Broken Fasts Claire sayeth “Do you aim that I should vomit?”

And that’s just a taste of Gould’s clever satirizing of Hughes’ 1980s teen speak as he recreates pretty much every iconic The Breakfast Club scene which co-directors Adrián Genesius Barrón and Phone Tha find clever ways to recreate on the Long Beach Playhouse stage. (Bender’s escape into the ceiling panels and subsequent fall into the library is particularly ingenious.)

All of this adds up to 90 minutes of fun and frolic (not counting the 15-minute intermission that’s been needlessly tacked on here) interpreted by a terrific young cast who’ve clearly done their Breakfast Club (and Shakespeare) homework.

 Cataldi’s perfectly prissy Claire, DiNardo’s gloriously geeky Brian, and Pianka’s wonderfully weird Allison are all three terrific, while a sensational Conrad more than does justice to the character Judd Nelson brought to life on the screen.

Not only does Bartlett make for a dynamic Andrew, his confession monolog is every bit as touching as Emilio Estevez’s was on film, Dane is a vice principle from hell if there ever was one, and playwright Gould makes for a droll, mini-guitar-strumming janitor Carl.

The move from Hollywood’s Broadwater Blackbox to the Long Beach Playhouse has allowed scenic designer Siyin Yan and lighting designer Andrew Roberts to go beyond Fringe Festival limits and give the production a more polished and colorful look than the one seen in production stills taken last summer.

Add to that the Elizabethan accouterments that costume designer Morgan Cordova-Stuart has added to the Breakfast Club’s iconic looks in a production design completed by Tha’s topnotch sound design and Keenan McCarty’s ingenious props, with Marycarmen Portillo has choreographing a couple of fun, movie-inspired dance sequences.

Salvatore Russildi understudies the role of John Bender. Felicia Cantu is stage manager. Caroline Witherspoon is assistant scenic designer and Izzy Martinez is associate scenic designer.

Nothing would make me happier than for The Club Of Broken Fasts to be given the extended-run L.A. engagement it richly deserves. In the meantime, Long Beach Playhouse audiences can count themselves lucky to have been given a second chance to see this Hollywood Fringe Festival gem.

Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach.
www.lbplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
January 10, 2026

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