The Man Who Came to Dinner

This is a glorious avalanche of a play, with characters that explode over the footlights. He’s forgotten now, but the main character was based on the real critic and radio personality Alexander Woollcott, a great baby of a man with a host of acquaintances, a mind like a steel trap, and a love of life that gobbled up everyone and everything in his path. This facsimile breaks his hip in Mesalia, Ohio, just before Christmas in the late 1930’s. He’s confined to a wheelchair so his friends–Noel Coward, Harpo Marx, and others–come to him. He terrorizes his hosts. He re-arranges everyone’s life. He does his Christmas broadcast surrounded by a small choir, a bevy of penguins, three thousand cockroaches, and an Egyptian mummy case. The Man Who Came to Dinner is directed by Neil Munro.