Brighton Beach Memoirs Hearty, Healthy Laughter
Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" now at Petrucci's Dinner Theatre offers the audience the healthy healing power of solid laughter. An instant accord occurs between generations. "Brighton Beach..." parents serve as straightmen to the easy, pervasive humor of the younger generation. The older generation, Blanch (Lani Novak Howe), Kate |Pennell Sornsen) and Jack (David Rothman) fraught with the pain of surviving a 1937 Great Depression overcrowded Brooklyn household are too inhibited to feel any humor in life.
Kate and Blanche come to grips with their feeling that Blanche must be a contributing family member. Kate's feeling comes to the surface when her husband Jack loses a second job
An impending World War 11 intensifies Jack's worry in taking in immigrating Polish relatives. Though one feels empathy with the parents; it is to the younger generation to which we seek a release from parent's agony. Interactions among Eugene (Bret Goldstein); Nora (Tami Tappan); Stanley (John Touhey); and Laurie (Helene Leclercq) top the show. Their enthusiasm and humor are pervasive for concerns from masturbation, a glimpse of Nora's naked body through the bathroom door keyhole to middlebrow concerns of the older generation.
It is necessary to have the traditional parental mannerisms to develop a kinship. "Brighton Beach..." runs thru August 16. "The Best of Burlesque" opens August 18.
—Sharon Kennedy