Secret Bridesmaid’s Business

It says something about how good a show is when you don’t feel like you’re watching actors on stage but instead watching real life. Such was the high calibre of LPAE’s Secret Bridesmaid’s Business.

A bride, her mum, and her bridesmaids are in a hotel room the night before the big day. Not everything goes to plan. What happens over the course of the night is at turns funny, sad, and heartfelt - but mostly funny, and even the groom pops in.

This show is a rare thing: a girls’ show that is also bloke friendly. Each character gets a soliloquay straight to audience, so we get to see their views on weddings, marriage, relationships (casual and long-term), and many other things, and what happened to each character to form those views. I can’t think of any other Australian “female friendly” play that summarises so well what it means to be male in Australian society.

Everything about this production feels natural: the dialogue, the acting, the characters’ reactions, and their movement around the hotel room.  The actors are perfectly cast: Allison Brown’s fretting neurotic mum, Katharine Babatzanis’s caring Matron of Honour, Christine Graf’s Bridesmaid-with-a-secret, Michael Lundberg’s Groom, and Samantha Sullivan’s late-arriving Friend don’t put a foot wrong. It’s a sign of great acting when you don’t notice the acting.

Melissa Rose as the Bride stole the show with her comic timing and natural reactions as the night unravelled. However, given this type of script, no one can really steal the show unless they have actors equally good to bounce the acting off, and in that respect Ms Rose is well matched by her fellow cast.

As the late-arriving friend Samantha Sullivan has a difficult role, in that her character is called to be part of the “bride’s happy gang of BFFs,” yet has reason for not being too friendly. In that regard some of those times when her character tries to avoid being too involved came off as disinterest instead of avoidance.

Small faults were due to it being Opening Night: at the start one of the cast rushed and scrambled the dialogue, projection was down in some small spots in Act 2, and some of the lighting cues were fumbled. We’ve all been there.

Credit to director Johnathon Brown and his co-director wife Sue for giving us such a polished and professional show. It’s a sign of excellent direction when you don’t notice the direction – especially in a verité-style play. And adding a wedding-reception-style lolly-counter for us “guests” at interval was a nice touch.

The only let-down about this show is the unfairly short season.

Great entertainment.

Peter Novakovich

Photographer: Jenifer Bryant