Norm Foster and a terrific cast make senior passion dance at The Lighthouse.
By Gary Smith | Special to the Hamilton Spectator
Thursday, August 29th, 2024
Canada’s favourite playwright, the guy who knows mirth-making better than anyone else, has a sweet comedy on his hands.
In our world of increasing tensions, we all need someone like Norm Foster to kick back and make us laugh.
Over the years, Foster has had some heavyweight successes. His comedies, “Here on The Flightpath,” “The Melville Boys” and “The Affections of May,” have been golden.
This time out, with the world premiere of his comedy “Lakefront” in Port Dover, he’s in a warmer, nostalgic mood.
His characters here are weathered, touched with a tinge of time. Feeling the rush even of “that enemy time,” something Tennessee Williams called the windstorm of regret and a fear of impending mortality.
But 70-year-old Robert and 68-year-old Christina, Foster’s aging risk-takers in “Lakefront,” are not through with life, not by a long-shot. Neither are they past the notion of romance’s soft caress. And maybe, just maybe, they’re ready to kick over the traces and risk a wild weekend together, somewhere nostalgic, like a worn-out old cabin, with its shabby furniture and tasteless orange cushions.
There’s a feel here everything’s tugged from some weather-beaten past. Fringed with dollops of clean white snow resting on its eaves and piled up around its extremities like globs of sugary marshmallow, it’s well, a tad surreal.
Somehow it suggests a world of old love, a world that needs the kindling flame of a roaring flame to ignite stilled passion.
Happily, Foster creates a necessary undertow in his excellent first act of this ultimately sweet and funny play.
Looking for love on the sunny side of 70, his characters are insecure, frightened and lonely. They’re also a tad rambunctious. They may be frightened of where they’re going and what they might do when they get there, but they’re going just the same.
The sadly worn cabin they rent for their tryst is of course a metaphor for the way time erodes everything.
There’s little decoration, faded furniture and a decided whiff of the ‘70s about the place. Those dobs of snow I’ve talked about already stretch across the roof and rest like waves of regret round the outer limits of the flimsy door.
Into this world, Robert and Christina stumble with their pasts as tightly held as their roller bags and shoulder cases. Of course, they’re looking for a second, or is that a third chance at happiness?
They’re likable people, especially in the nicely calibrated, oh so truthful performances from Melodee Finlay and Ralph Small. She’s waifish and vulnerable. He’s bullish and loud. Both are believable for every moment of the first act of Foster’s play.
Finlay has never looked lovelier. She wears her maturity and well, let’s say it, age, like a translucent skin that gives her a slightly fuller frame and more mature appeal.
Over the years, Finlay has starred in a number of plays at Dover, but she’s never been better than right now.
When she walks out of the bedroom door of Eric Bunnell’s weathered old set, hair tousled, eyes lit up like blinking stars, her little shuffle of love, joy and contentment is so endearing you just long to hold her hand and squeeze hard.
Small, who began his theatre career in Hamilton, and about a year ago was so polished and perfect in Sky Gilbert’s wonderful play “Pat and Skee” at Theatre Aquarius, finds such revelatory moments in Foster’s Robert that you ache for his masculine fears about sex, life and the whole damn thing.
You don’t quite want to laugh at his slightly distended paunch wrapped in perfectly outlandish pyjamas, but of course you do. But the laugh is bittersweet, because we know he’s trying so hard to recapture what might be left of his youth.
Together, these two wonderful actors find everything exquisite in Foster’s play and more.
They’re aided and abetted by rubber-faced Derek Ritschel’s comedy turn as Duane, the cabin park’s babysitting factotum.
Ritschel has this role down so well that with every pop-eyed twitch and double take he makes us laugh. It’s not his fault his character simply wears out before the end of the play’s problematic and protracted second act
It is, after all, that second act that’s the problem here. It doesn’t quite equal the authenticity of Foster’s first one. So, the play nosedives into a series of short, awkward scenes that neither flesh out the play, nor its characters. Not even the fine performances, nor the felicitous direction of Jeffrey Wetsch can prevent this happening.
As always, costume wizard Alex Amini has given the characters perfect duds to wear. As always, too, all the production values at Dover are first class.
So, let’s not be churlish, Foster has given us characters to care about and a play worth watching. If “Lakefront” had the power and punch of its first act, right up to its rambunctious curtain call, we’d be dancing out of the theatre on a wave of love.
It doesn’t. No matter. Half a wave is better than none. And Finlay and Small will make you dance anyway, until the final moment, just like some latter day Rogers and Astaire, no matter what they say or do.
Lakefront
Who Lighthouse Festival Theatre
Where 247 Main St. Port Dover and Roselawn Theatre, 296 Fielden Ave. Port Colborne.
When In Dover until Sept. 7 then Port Colborne from Sept. 11 through Sept. 22. Evenings at 8 p.m. most days. With matinees at 2 p.m. some days, Call the box office for details.
Tickets Port Dover, $46 to $51; Port Colborne $45. Students and equity members reduced to $18 at both theatres. For either theatre call 1-888-7703 to purchase.
Gary Smith has written about theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator, as well as a variety of international publications, for more than 40 years.
