<b>TONS OF MONEY</b> Royal George Theatre/Shaw Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

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TONS OF MONEY Royal George Theatre/Shaw Festival

By Augustine Warner

Plays wear out.
What do I mean?
Basically, the time or the place or the plot are so isolated from today that it doesn�t work.
�Tons of Money� hasn�t gone over the edge, quite, but it is tired and is pitched to an audience which isn�t up to speed on English law on succession to noble titles and when the money at stake is less than the posted prices on a lot of houses in the Buffalo area and certainly well below the prices for houses in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the Shaw Festival�s home.
The 1922 play from Will Evans and Valentine was a hit in its day and in a 1981 Shaw production but a $470 thousand inheritance just isn�t much anymore and clearly someone decided not to update the value.
Aubrey Henry Maitland Allington (Mike Nadajewski) and significant other Louise Allington (Julia Course) suffer from a centuries-old problem, they don�t have the cash to support their lifestyle and aren�t paying their bills.
That�s been a plot point in British plays for years because there have been so many generations of the �ton� who never quite pay their bills.
On top of the lifestyle costs, the set from Judith Bowden shows that the palatial spread in which the Allingtons and relatives live costs a lot for staff and maintenance.
When the two analyze what they will receive in a relative�s will, they figure it will just about cover their bills.
So, the two decide on a scam involving death and resurrection.
They decide Aubrey will die and be reborn as a long-lost relative and keep the cash.
That precipitates a plot of surfacing fake relatives and absolute uncertainty about who is alive and who is dead.
Director Eda Holmes has to accumulate a herd of farce actors to make it all work, including enough identical characters to set up a production of �Twelfth Night.�
It also requires the butler Sprules (Graeme Somerville) and the maid Simpson (Marla McLean) to be the rigid and serious element in this whole comedy.
Somebody has to be.
It�s a farce, people hurtling in and out of doors (lots of doors) and the various fake Maitlands coming in and out and apparent deaths add up.
This requires Nadajewski to be this flexible and comic performer.
For the Shaw that�s important because the last time �Tons of Money� was staged Heath Lamberts was Aubrey.
I didn�t see Lamberts in this show, although I did see him in the annual farce the next two seasons and in my recollection he was a little better, a little more in keeping with the history of farce.
Clearly, the festival would like more farces, preferably to the level of last season�s hilarious �One Man, Two Guvnors.�
Shaw can be tiring.
Having said all of this, �Tons of Money� is well-directed, entertaining and pleasant and you just have to sit back and laugh and skip the insanity of it all.
There are a number of strong performances, Nadajewski, Course, Somerville, McLean, Sepehr Reybod and Qasim Khan.
It is funny.

A.W.