Mark your calendars!
Rock River Players present Hecht and MacArthur’s big comedy,
FRONT PAGE directed by Bahman Mahdavi.
November 5-7 and 12-14.
Fridays & Saturdays at 7; Sundays at 2:30.
Seating limited to 40 per performance. Online tix available here
Tickets–$10, $8 for students and seniors.
This screwball comedy is a purely American story, as American as baseball, jazz or the Grand Canyon. Not that sensational journalists, crooked politicians, manipulative newspaper editors and inept gangsters don’t exist elsewhere in the world, but Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s expert plotting and rapid-fire, streetwise dialogue establish it firmly in time (1928) and place (Chicago). This could not have been written by Noel Coward nor Oscar Wilde.
Originally staged on Broadway in 1928, the play thumbed its nose at polite refinement with its rough-edged, ethically elastic characters; its coarse language and gritty situations; and its hard-bitten view of political corruption and law-enforcement ineptitude. The fast paced, ra-ta-tat dialogue and the ever-increasing pace of the story bring a certain euphoria to the audience that we can still experience today when watching classic 1930s & ‘40s films by Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Frank Capra or Leo McCarey.
“Mounting this ambitious production has been an epic journey of its own,” Mahdavi muses. “Started in the fall of 2019, we are delighted to finally perform the show in front of a public audience, after a long pandemic hiatus.”
The company is fully vaccinated. Masks and vaccination are required of all audience members.