‘Many Happy Returns’ topped Playhouse calendar

And Beth Broderick delivered bravura performance in one-woman show, ‘Bad Dates,’ at Laguna theater. Saving the best for last, the Laguna Playhouse produced an all-out laugh riot with a holiday theme, Bernard Farrell’s “Many Happy Returns,” this reviewer’s selection as the top show at the playhouse in 2005.

This production, the fourth of Farrell’s plays to receive its American premiere at the playhouse, centered on a planned holiday celebration which turned into hilarious disaster. Artistic director Andrew Barnicle, as this column observed, “mounted a fresh, brutally farcical take on the holiday season.”

Runner-up on the 2005 hit list was the season opener, entitled “The Musical of Musicals: The Musical.” This inventive production, created by Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart, went “Forbidden Broadway” one better, presenting a musical theater concept in five contrasting styles with all-new music and lyrics.

“Bright Ideas,” Barnicle’s staging of Eric Coble’s satiric comedy about a couple who’d do anything -- up to and including murder -- to get their child enrolled in a prestigious preschool. The 16 supporting characters in the play all were delivered by three actors.

Only one performer was required to make “Bad Dates” a memorable experience. Beth Broderick excelled in a 90-minute one-on-one encounter with the audience under the direction of Judith Ivey.

Broderick’s bravura performance, which left the audience “thoroughly entranced,” earn her best actress honors for 2005 from this column. Best actor laurels go to Barry Lynch, who performed “magnificently” as the harried host in “Many Happy Returns.”

Other individual standouts at the playhouse during 2005 were Pat Caldwell in “Bright Ideas,” Tom Shelton and Deedee Rescher in “The Underpants,” and the entire cast -- all four of them -- in “The Musical of Musicals.” That would be Alli Mauzey, Mary Gordon Murray, Brent Shindele and pianist Eric Rockwell.

Youth theater was well served by retiring director Joe Lauderdale, who staged “Sarah, Plain and Tall” as his final production as artistic director of the playhouse’s youth drama program, then returned at the beginning of the current season with a delightful rendition of “Wiley and the Hairy Man.”