Sheridan Whiteside is probably the worst houseguest in the world. A sometimes boorish, sometimes charming critic and raconteur, Sheridan is dropped (thanks to a patch of ice) into his worst petit bourgeois nightmare: weeks on end in a wheelchair, recovering from a leg injury in small-town Mesalia, Ohio. The hell that Sheridan raises over the course of the ensuing Christmas season sometime in the late ‘30s is at the center of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, which is now being presented by the Saint Sebastian Players.
Bill Chamberlain does a terrific slow burn as Sheridan, a fictionalized version of real-life gay Algonquin Roundtable denizen Alexander Woolcott. Chamberlain has to carry much of the show’s energy confined to a wheelchair, and he’s terrific blasting both his hosts, the oh-so-conventional Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Stanley (David R. Feiler and Jill Chukerman Test), and his medical team (Russ Grager and Ellen Shaw) with machine-gun rounds of insults and complaints.
Sheridan’s life becomes even further unglued when his right-hand woman Maggie (Claire Rutkowski) falls in love with handsome local journalist Bert (Jered Becker), triggering both Sheridan’s (platonic) jealousy and his unrelenting God complex. Maggie is the only person who can tolerate long bouts of Sheridan, so he’s not about to let her go so easily.
All that’s the setup for Sheridan to bring in his eccentric friends to gum up the works, most of them inspired by some of Woolcott’s real-life buddies: Lorraine Sheldon (Melinda “MJ” Deamon), a fictional counterpart to Gertrude Lawrence; Beverly Carlton (Joseph Adlesick), a surrogate for Noël Coward; and Banjo (Zach Kunde), Hart and Kaufman’s stand-in for Harpo Marx (whom the real-life Woolcott carried an unrequited torch for).
Kunde adds some zesty energy when Banjo enters in Act II, and Deamon is fun as Lorraine, who’s one-part each gold-digger, home-wrecker and insatiably ambitious actress. Lord Bottomley, the long-suffering, bucktoothed aristocrat whom Lorraine is stalking back in England, is practically a character in all of this, though he never once appears on stage.
Hart and Kaufman had a knack for zingers, especially as Sheridan delivers them here, and it’s a shame that many of his cultural references (ZaSu Pitts, Booth Tarkington, Hamilton Fish and William Beebe, among others) might leave a modern audience scratching their heads. The Man Who Came to Dinner was much appreciated in its day—so much so that Woolcott and Marx eventually starred together as these fictionalized versions of themselves in a Los Angeles production—and epitomizes a well-structured, effective drawing room comedy.
Director Sean Michael Barrett keeps the action moving at a brisk pace, but be prepared for a longer show—this clocked in at nearly three hours, including an intermission. And kudos to Set Designer Emil Zbella and Costume Designer Mary McCarthy; I’ve often left impressed with the Saint Sebastian Players’s productions, which usually convey realistic and vibrant settings given the limitations of their venue. They don’t make ‘em like The Man Who Came to Dinner anymore, but this show is a great excuse to travel back in time with some colorful characters—and some even more colorful wisecracks.
Saint Sebastian Players’s production of The Man Who Came to Dinner runs through Feb 16 at St. Bonaventure Church, 1625 W. Diversey Pkwy. Click here for tickets and more information.