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Arts & Entertainment

'Barefoot in the Park' Gets a Fresh Coat of Paint

The Neil Simon piece will run at Playhouse 22 thorough early Oct. 2.

When it comes to classic comedy on stage, Mary Lynn Dobson knows what she’s talking about.

One of the most prolific and successful directors who frequent East Brunswick’s community theater, she has helmed such American theatrical classics as “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Sylvia,” “She Loves Me," and the first musical produced at the theater’s Cranbury Road location, “Guys and Dolls.”

The lesson she’s learned from all this funny is a simple one.

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“Classic comedy never dies,” said Dobson during a recent rehearsal break at the theater. “Even if it was written 50 years ago, if it’s done with great actors it can stand the test of time.”

It’s a theory she’s setting out to prove once again.

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To kick off Playhouse 22’s 2011-2012 season, the Atlantic Highlands resident directs Neil Simon’s “,” the 1963 classic about two head over heels newlyweds and their trials and tribulations as they realize their honeymoon is, both literally and figuratively, over.

While this is Dobson’s first production of a Simon play at Playhouse 22, it’s not her first experience with America’s most well known comedic playwright. She directed “The Odd Couple” at Lakewood’s Strand Theater in 2008, a production that Playhouse 22 remembered when setting their new season. “They remembered that when I did “The Odd Couple,” I didn’t put a spin on it, I just freshened it up,” Dobson said. “It’s like working with a good, solid old house, and you put a new coat of paint on it.”

For this production of Barefoot, Dobson thinks she’s found her new coat of paint in her two leads: Annie Brzozowski and Danny Pennacchi. As the newlyweds Corie and Paul Bratter, Brzozowski and Pennacchi face the challenge of portraying a young couple madly in love despite polar opposite personalities. Paul is a straight-laced young attorney who’s just passed the bar, while his new wife is the type of free spirit who loves walking barefoot through Central Park in the dead of winter.

“(Annie) was just so earnest and so sincere and so believable,” Dobson said of Brzozowski’s audition. “The language is a bit dated. It’s hard not to sound silly when you say things like ‘Goodness!’ or ‘Golly!’ She knew how to say the lines indicative of how you’d say them in 1963, without sounding like ‘Oh, I’m reading these lines from 1963.’ ”

Dobson had similar praise for Pennacchi. “Danny, he was just different,” she said. '“He was very interesting in the way he handled his lines. Everything he and Annie read together, it clicked. He wasn’t the cookie cutter Robert Redford type, and he made it work.”

The chemistry between the two was apparent to Dobson at auditions. “They actually had a couple of moments at the callbacks where they clicked, about four or five times,” Dobson said. “Moments where you already saw the characters coming through.”

Brzozowski and Pennacchi enjoy the bulk of the stage time, but Dobson has cast excellent actors in the supporting roles to give her new coat of paint extra zest. Two of the more prominent supporting characters are Ethel Banks, Corie’s meddling, stick-in-the-mud mother, and the Bratter’s upstairs neighbor Victor Velasco, who the newlyweds are dismayed to learn can only access his apartment through their new bedroom.

As Ethel, Dobson has cast Catherine Rowe, who recently completed a run as Amanda in another American classic, Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” for Turning Leaf Theater Company at Circle Players in Piscataway. Joe Vierno, last seen earlier this year as Shylock in Playhouse 22’s “The Merchant of Venice,” plays Victor. Jeff Maschi and Bob Dumpert, two actors also extremely familiar to local theater audiences, round out the cast as a suffering telephone repairman and deliveryman forced to make their way to the Bratter’s fifth story walkup apartment.

To round out her fresh coat of paint, Dobson has added a little bit of her own color around the corners. Richard Sibello, an actor, DJ, 60’s music enthusiast and friend of Dobson’s, has recorded a simulated 1965 radio show. The original piece will serve as a backdrop to scene changes and provide an extra kick of nostalgic flair.

“Barefoot in the Park” opens Friday, Sept. 16 and runs through Sunday, Oct. 2. Performances are Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets cost $20 for adults and $18 for students and senior citizens.

For more information about the theater, its current and future productions, and to buy tickets, visit them at www.playhouse22.org or call 732-254-3939.

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