Cappies Review: 'The Man Who Came To Dinner' At Langley High School

By Meg Hunter of The New School of Northern Virginia

"If Florence Nightingale had nursed you, Mr. Whiteside, she would have married Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross." So, the long-suffering nurse Miss Preen (Katie Murchison) tells her patient, famous newscaster Sheridan Whiteside (Conor Farah), in Langley High School's rollicking production of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

Centered around Whiteside's schemes to prevent his loyal secretary Maggie (Sarah Hilton) from marrying the guileless local newspaperman Bert (Ethan Bhatia), "The Man Who Came to Dinner" has been giving its viewers stomachaches from laughing too hard since 1939, and Langley's excellent interpretation has kept up the tradition.

At the Saxon Stage, techies and performers worked together to completely transport the audience to Mesalia, Ohio, with painstaking care obvious in every aspect of the production. The excellent set design done by Killian Korchnak, Victoria Scarpato, Mo Rees, and Talia-Rose Diorio produced a picture-perfect 1930s household, filled with realistic clutter.

The effort put into costumes, transforming regular clothes into period style clothing (Logan Dooley, Evey Burnette, Hannah Whalen, and Lorna Evans) was admirable. Commendation must also go to the stage management team (Izzy Steenburgh, Lillian Weimer, and Jenny Mears) for one particularly impressive set of cues wherein the butler, John (Neev Poran) flipped a light switch on stage at the exact same time that the back of the set lit up.

Inhabiting this carefully crafted world was an amazing cast of performers, with wonderful wordless acting and an impressive talent for behaving as if responding to someone on the phone. Everyone on stage truly embodied their characters, from Sarah Hilton as Maggie perfectly capturing the bustling walk of a secretary and the blushing determination of a woman in love, to Nico Morandi-Zerpa shining in the climax as Mr. Stanley, Whiteside's unwilling host, finally getting to throw him out, to Scarlett Spano's lovely over-the-top mannerisms as glamorous actress Lorraine Sheldon.

A special shout-out must go to the show's two scene-stealers: Brady Kastner as the flamboyant, charismatic Banjo, who captured the audience's hearts despite only entering into the plot towards the end, and Joana Lima Alves Montenegro, whose delightfully creepy body language as Harriet Stanley brought the house down every time.

But no other performer came close to reaching the level attained by Conor Farah as Whiteside. The radio personality was a difficult man, crotchety and often hard to put up with, yet as he was the protagonist and on-stage for almost all of the show, the audience needed to genuinely like him. It would be a challenging role for any professional actor, and Farah, a high school senior, did a masterful job, striking the perfect balance between the overbearing, infuriating meddler and the charming, lovable rogue.

Even when most furious at him for messing with Maggie's happiness, the audience still roots for her to forgive him in the end. Farah's pitch-perfect sardonic tone made his every insult hysterical, and his moments of genuine kindness all the more moving.

That is the greatest of Langley's achievements: keeping the audience on the edge of their seats and swept up in the story both at the most hilarious moments of the play, such as the numerous times the hapless Dr. Bradley (Nick Kristensen) attempted to get Whiteside to look at his manuscript and at the most heart-wrenching ones, such as when Maggie despairingly asked Whiteside: "I love him so terribly. Why did you do it, Sherry? Why did you do it?"

It's no wonder that during the curtain call, "The Man Who Came to Dinner"'s cast and crew received an uproarious standing ovation.