The Guild Theatre’s first production for 2018 is a comedy that is succulent, ripened – and cherry picked.
Veteran director Rachel Cliffe will bring A Bad Year for Tomatoes to Rockdale for a month-long run starting on February 9.
Another Rockdale veteran, Anne McMaster, will play the dual lead role of Myra Marlowe – and her crazy sister, Sadie – which she said was the biggest she had ever undertaken in her 41 years at the theatre.
Myra, a famed television actress, retreats from the pressures of her life in Hollywood to a quiet village in New England. For the next year she plans to take it easy, write her autobiography and grow tomatoes.
While she is successful in fending off her agent’s attempts to lure her back to Hollywood, she is unsuccessful in fending off the locals. They interfere and annoy her constantly so, in a desperate bid to keep them at bay, she invents a maniacal sister locked upstairs who is likely to escape unpredictably. The ruse works a treat until the locals decide to step in and help this poor lost soul.
Cliffe is well versed in this field and knows a good farcical comedy when she sees it. She said she also enjoyed that the John Patrick-written play had wonderfully eccentric characters, especially for women of various ages.
Another veteran of the theatre, Pauline Randall, was last seen in I Hate Hamlet but returns to play Cora Gump, a town gossip who likes a drink or five. Kim Jones makes her Guild Theatre debut with her first role as Willa Mae Wilcox who is reputed to be practicing the dark arts.
Barry McMaster, also in his first Guild Theatre production after returning to theatrical life, plays Myra’s agent Tom Lamond. McMaster said he could relate to the character’s confident, loud-mouthed witticisms as he was once an agent himself in the 1970s and believed audiences would relate to the theme of having an idealistic dream turn to dust.
George Gleeson returns to the Guild stage as Piney, a man of few words, which makes for a challenge to convey the appropriate meaning through his character’s spare responses.
Details: guildtheatre.com.au
