THE HANGOVER REPORT – A terrific revival of Richard Bean’s raucous TOAST gets 59E59’s Brits Off-Broadway festival off to an auspicious start

imageAny serious New York theatergoer knows that 59E59’s Brits Off-Broadway is one of the key festivals on the theater calendar. It gives local audiences the privileged opportunity to sample some of the very best in recent British Fringe and regional theater – productions (complete with their British casts and creative teams) that us Americans would likely never have gotten to, even as tourists visiting the other side of the pond.

This year’s edition got off to an auspicious start with a terrific revival of Toast, a hard-to-classify early play by Richard Bean, who is most famously known for having penned the smash hit One Man, Two Guvnors (making a star out of James Corden), a big success both in the West End and on Broadway. Toast, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1999, is an often grim but ultimately life-affirming play that raucously celebrates community and the human spirit. At the same time, it doesn’t shy away from depicting some of the crushing realities of the blue collar work environment. The play tells the story of a bread factory in northern England and the proud workers who keep it afloat, despite the covert efforts of some (a sabotaging employee and an ambiguously-written messenger) to undermine these hearty men and their livelihood.

The big-hearted production currently parked at 59E59 is directed with a sure hand by Eleanor Rhode, who has the tricky job of finding just the right tone that Mr. Bean’s play needs from moment to moment. That’s because Toast unapologetically straddles a number of genres of theater (farce, realism, absurdism) in a way that’s completely natural. Suffice to say, Ms. Rhode does an expert job at locating the erratic pulse of the play. As befitting a blue collar environment, the design is appropriately grungy and admirably detailed (James Turner is the production designer, with Mike Robertson on lights and Max Pappenheim on sound). The seven-member, all-male cast is impeccable. These actors – Will Barton, Simon Greenall, Matthew Kelly, Kieran Knowles, Steve Nicolson, Matt Sutton, and John Wark – are individually giving pungent, fully lived-in performances that register larger-than-life yet feel totally authentic. As an ensemble, they’re electric to behold and a potent reminder of the beauty of and the necessity for solidarity in the face of the greatest odds.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

TOAST
Off-Broadway, Play
59E59 Theaters
2 hours, 10 minutes (with one intermission)
Through May 22

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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