Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper (left) and Andrew Polec in "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder." Photo by Aaron Rumley

             It was fitting that Robert L. Freedman, who wrote the book and lyrics for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” was in the audience on opening night of North Coast Repertory Theatre’s production of this Tony Award-winning (in 2014) show. He, along with Steven Lutvak who wrote lyrics and the operetta score for “Guide,” are responsible for having given the world a musical comedy classic.
             “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” is hella witty, benignly subversive and utterly enjoyable, a master-craft marriage of catchy tune and biting lyric.
            Perfect example: “I Don’t Understand the Poor,” sung with self-satisfied disdain by Lord Adalbert D’Ysquith, he of the aristocratic family destined to be knocked off one by one over the course of two and a half hours. Written as if by the GOP platform committee or a Trump lackey for some red-capped rally, it goes this way:
            “I don’t understand the poor, the lives they lead, of want and need
            I should think it would be a bore
            It seems to be nothing but stubbornness
            Oh, what’s all the suffering for?
            To be so debased is in terrible taste
            I don’t understand the poor.”
            If that doesn’t garner sympathy for outsider Monty Navarro’s plot to kill off the D’Ysquith family and ascend to the Highhurst lordship, nothing does. Even if he’s doing it less to right social wrongs and more to avenge his mother, a rightful member of the D’Ysquiths who was disowned, and to win the heart of the status-seeking beauty Sibella.
            I first saw “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love in Murder” 12 years ago in its Old Globe premiere, but other than remembering how phenomenal Jefferson Mays was portraying everyone in the doomed D’Ysquith clan, most of it had slipped into the fog of the hundreds of shows I’ve seen since.
            The winning North Coast Rep production reminded me of just how delicious an affair “Guide” is.
            Noelle Marion directs a talented cast, one exquisitely costumed for turn-of-the-20th-century London aristocracy by Elisa Benzoni. As with the memorable 1949 film “Kind Hearts and Coronets” based on the Roy Horniman novel “Israel Rank,” Freedman and Lutvak’s black comedy musical focuses on the tale’s converging forces: likable but murder-minded Monty (Andrew Polec) and the eight variously cartoonish members of the D’Ysquith family (all of them, male and female, played by Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper). The latter is an actor’s dream undertaking: Mays, currently onstage at the Old Globe in the farce “Noises Off,” defined the D’Ysquiths in Hartford, at the Globe and on Broadway. That makes for mighty big Edwardian shoes for Mongiardo-Cooper to fill. He certainly meets the challenge here in all its bluster and physicality, though no one is Mays.
            Polec is nimble and high-energy and tailor-made for Monty, he who is ingenious and conscience-less, and dashing enough to attract both material-girl Sibella (Lauren Weinberg, who shone so brightly in NC Rep’s “Camelot” last year) and the sweet Miss Phoebe D’Ysquith (Katy Tang, like Weinberg a beautifully rangy vocalist).
            Unseen but they who should not be unsung are the four musicians who accompany the singing cast: musical director Daniel Lincoln, Jennifer Williams, Amy Kalal and Katrina Earl.
            Director Marion employs effectively an accompanying acting ensemble (Michael Cavinder, Andrew Hey, Shinah Hey, Jean Kauffman) that fills multiple roles and executes stage antics that heighten the proceedings. Theatrical devices such as when Asquith D’Ysquith and a Florodora girl go ice skating – only to fall into a hole in the ice, courtesy of Monty – and Monty’s frantically separating rivals Sibella and Phoebe on either side of a door are part of the madcap delights here.
            Comical highlights in song abound, like Monty and Henry D’Ysquith propounding that things are “Better With a Man,” Phoebe’s wooing “Inside Out” and the stagy “Barrel of a Gun,” which precipitates the demise of Lord Adalbert.
            Everyone onstage in Solana Beach looks to be having the time of their lives (or deaths), and who can blame them with the material they’ve got? At the same time, this dark comedy operetta has to be rigorous work. But what work!
            I’ve got a weakness for stage musicals that minimize the use of traditional ballads – like “Spamalot” and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” Also stage musicals that can revel in silliness. They’ve earned their exalted positions in Broadway lore every bit as much as the Rodgerses and Hammersteins and Sondheims and Kanders and Ebbs have.
            “Guide” is North Coast Rep’s closing show of its 43rd season. It’s a rousing way to wind it up.
            “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” runs through Aug. 17 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

The cast of "Nothing On" has something crazy going in "Noises Off."                  Photo by Rich Soublet II

            For maximum appreciation and enjoyment of “Noises Off” one must make a friend of mayhem. That is this longstanding British farce’s stock-in-trade.
            Doors fly open, then slam. Slam, then fly open. Stairs are seemingly made for galloping up or tumbling down. Projectiles fly. Wardrobes malfunction. Props are fumbled and abused. Cast members incur more comic physical punishment than in a “3 Stooges” marathon.
            But Michael Frayn’s wild classic about actors (plus a very beleaguered director and two very harried stage managers) putting on a show called “Nothing On” is not lowbrow entertainment. His script calls for exhaustive pratfalling and some definite mugging, but it is a clever one with a good deal of witty banter – provided you can hear it over an audience that, guaranteed, will be howling. Especially by Act 3 when the whole shebang goes full-on chaotic.
            It takes a director as experienced with farce as is Gordon Greenberg to instill just enough order and cohesion into “Noises Off” that it doesn’t fly completely off the rails. Greenberg’s resume at the Old Globe, where “Noises Off” opened on Friday night, has been burnished by “Crime and Punishment, A Comedy” and “Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors,” both staged in the Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White theater-in-the-round. His instincts are therefore impeccable.
            “Nothing On,” on the other hand, has a director named Lloyd Dallas (James Waterston)  who may know what he’s doing, but the odds, the fates and circumstances out of his control are against him.
            Many if not most theatergoers have seen “Noises Off” at least once by now; it premiered in 1982. It was last seen locally at Lamb’s Players Theatre in 2018 with Robert Smyth directing. Besides its sheer wackiness the show is notable for its stagecraft – Act One takes place in an English theater where “Nothing On” is being rehearsed; for Act Two, the set is turned completely around and the audience sees a performance coming-undone from a backtsage view; the front view is restored for Act Three when another performance, deteriorating at a faster clip even than in the previous act, is happening.
            Scenic designer Todd Rosenthal created for Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago the depiction of a two-story country home owned by the fictitious Brents; the Globe’s set is a slight modification of that, and it works like a charm.
            So does the cast of nine, headlined by the stupendous Jefferson Mays. An actor of pretty much matchless energy, ingenuity and comedic instincts, his blood-phobic Frederick Fellowes is worth the price of a ticket. Watch him, trousers around his ankles, hop one step at a time from ground floor to second. Watch him keel over with abandon. Listen to him earnestly attempting to bring a measure of sanity to the proceedings – naturally in vain.
            Second in sight-gag heaven to Mays’ hop up the stairs is Michelle Veintimilla’s crawl down them in her underthings – she’s portraying a nearsighted starlet, Brooke Ashton, who’s lost her contact lenses.
            The play-within-a-play ensemble also features Linda Mugleston as Dotty Otley, who keeps forgetting her lines. (She does remember to shout “sardines” about a hundred times); Nehal Joshi as vaguely leading-man-ish Garry Lejeune; Orville Mendoza as a sot playing a burglar; and Bryonha Marie, calling all her fellow actors “love” and doing the best of the improvising when “Nothing On” collapses. Abby Leigh Huffstetler and Matthew Patrick Davis are the stage managers tasked along with their director to manage the unmanageable.
            Everyone’s dressed, or undressed, with elan by costume designer Izumi Inaba; Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum should be applauded for coordinating the “Noises Off” stunts, as should voice and dialect coach Lauren Lovett for the veddy prop-uh British accents some cast members demonstrate.
            All this said, two and a half hours of “Noises Off,” or “Nothing On,” is more than I genuinely require for amusement. I could probably watch Jefferson Mays onstage for twice that long and not feel a bit antsy, but slapstick farce in general only goes so far with me. I must be in the minority because at the performance I attended audience members around me laughed even harder the longer the show went.
            To get into the spirit of the script, I’ll say that I shant quibble. We need the laughter right now when so much of the real noise around us is frightening and negative. As the playwright Frayn wrote: “I haven’t come to the theater to hear about other people’s problems. I’ve come to be taken out of myself, and, preferably, not put back again.”
            “Noises Off” runs through Aug. 10 at the Old Globe in Balboa Park.

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a highlight of "The '70s! The Golden Age of the Album." Photo courtesy of Lamb's Players Theatre.

            I don’t know how many songs are performed, in part or in their entirety, in Lamb’s Players Theatre’s “The ‘70s! The Golden Age of the Album.” I didn’t count them because I was immersed in memories from long ago.
            Like when I spun records as a DJ on my college radio station. Like when I would browse the racks at Tower Records sometimes just to be blown away by the album cover art. Like when my friends and I would party with vinyl on summer nights.
            This show created by Kerry Meads and Vanda Eggington is indeed a musical trip down Memory Lane, 1970s edition. It celebrates the soundtrack of that decade and in particular songs that were part of a sea change in the music business, when the emphasis morphed from making hit singles to creating album tracks that would get airplay on fledgling FM rock radio.
            This is Meads’ and Eggington’s fourth go-round at this sort of revue for Lamb’s, having teamed up in the past on the ‘60s-flavored “Boomers,” “American Rhythm” covering the Great American Songbook and most recently the tribute to female artists of the 1960s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
            I enjoyed “The 70s!” the most of the bunch mainly because I feel more emotional attachment to the music and the artists of the era who made it. This is just a partial list: Neil Young, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Queen. They’re all present in this 140-minute-long theatrical concert directed by Meads.
            Sure, there are conspicuous omissions, like the Allman Brothers and the Stones and The Who and Santana and Steely Dan; and the arrival of punk rock (the Ramones maybe?) and hip-hop (perhaps the Sugarhill Gang?) are ignored. But everyone who attends will have some quarrel with a favorite singer-songwriter or band that's left out. Certainly Meads and Eggington have done the best they can without creating a show that’s five hours’ long.
            “The ‘70s!” wouldn’t be as entertaining as it is were it not for a crack ensemble of musicians covering all those gems from the era. Lamb’s has got on guitar Steve Gouveia (always great to see and hear him onstage) and Garry Hall (his Jimmy Page solo on “Stairway to Heaven” is a beaut); David Rumley on drums; Angela Chatelain Avila on violin; and the guy they call the “Rockfather,” Rik Ogden, on multiple instruments. Playing bass and demonstrating that her young age is no impediment to rocking out on songs recorded long, long before her birth is 21-year-old Avery Nelson. Also in the cast and contributing instrumentally and/or vocally: Sydney Joiner, Russ Mitchell, Nathan Nonhof, Natasha Reece, Caleb Schanzenbach, Scott Glenn Roberts, Logan Stevens, Leonard Patton, Joy Yandell-Hall and Ben Van Diepen.
            You need that many people to re-create the incredibly diverse genres of the decade: confessional, singer-songwriter-driven pop, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, disco, art rock – it seemed like everything from the sugary Carpenters to the exultant Earth, Wind & Fire to Belushi and Aykroyd as the Blues Brothers.
            As I said earlier, a few of the songs covered are performed start to finish, but most are versions trimmed for expediency. The performances that demonstrate the most theatricality are of songs that tell a cohesive story, such as The Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son.”
            Choreography by Christine Wiser Hall is mobilizes and enhances the storytelling aspect of “The ‘70s.” If there’s one thing that the decade can and should be ridiculed for is its fashion sense, or lack thereof. Did people really dress like that? OMG, did I? But the styles are well-conceived by costume designer Jemima Dutra, and they’re actually welcome in the show’s elaborate disco sequence. (Kudos to Wisner Hall here, too, for transporting us back to “Disco Inferno” time.)
            I was especially gratified to see and hear Marvin Gaye honored for his landmark “What’s Going On” album. If there was a conscience to the ‘70s expressed musically it was his.
            Yes, for fans there’s a predictable Fleetwood Mac “set” in the show and a fine “Bohemian Rhapsody” cover and plenty for Eagles fans.
            A nifty enhancement for the audience is the projection on a screen of the album covers from which each ‘70s song is performed. I miss those incredible covers, some of them veritable works of art.
            I miss FM radio the way it used to be, too – not corporate owned, not canned, not voiced by cookie-cutter DJs (if there’s a live DJ at all these days). Now album-oriented-radio, and radio in general, has been marginalized or even neutered by the digital delivery of music. I mean ask yourself: When was the last time you listened to music on the radio, and not in your car?
            This show also makes the case that musically the 1970s may not have been crowned revolutionary as was the 1960s but it was in its own right pretty freaking incredible with a diversity of genres, songwriting and artistry that deserves celebration in a production like this one at Lamb’s.
            I don’t listen to “classic rock” radio because I can’t abide hearing “Carry On My Wayward Son” (alas, it’s in this show) or “All Right Now” or “China Grove” anymore. But being immersed in among the most engaging and best-produced music of the 1970s, as I was at Lamb’s, is an altogether more personal experience. If the decade stirs in you any similar sort of feeling, you’ll discover what I’m talking about.
            “The ‘70s! The Golden Age of the Album” runs through Sept. 14 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.