stage/screen

'Odd Couple' Still Hilarious, Lakewood Production Proves

By PETER BELLAMY -If one can see the same comedy for the sixth time and find himself still roaring with laughter the

and I have seen it played as such.

HAPPILY, such is by no means the case in Lakewood Little Theater's highly successful production of perior comedy and quite the play. Director Karl Mac-

chances are that it's a su-

well done.

This was the case with me as I saw "The Odd Couple,” the current production at Lakewood Little Theater.

NEIL SIMON'S play about the hilarious conflict between the habits and dis· positions of two men drawn into living together through marital discord took an original situation, common to our times, and drenched it with side-splitting oneliners.

In the hands of incompetent actors "The Odd Couple" can be a disaster

key and the members of his cast unerringly catch the mood and tense of the play, with its touching and numourous moods and comment on this era.

Eddy Halas plays the role of the bluff, extrovert, slopdoodle to perfection. His apartment mate, as played apartment mate, as played by Bernard Singerman, is likewise, as fussy, maddeningly neat and domestic.

SINGERMAN'S role is the more difficult to play. Like many sexually integrated males, he must appear to have more than the usual amount of the feminine in him without appearing as a homosexual. Any hint of the. latter would cheapen and destroy the play.

They emphasize the playwright's implied conclusion that the very differences between the male and the feI male, which have made matrimony a going relationship since the dawn of man, make too close companionship between normal males impossible and hysterically funny.

AMONG THE comic highlights of "The Odd Couple"

are the poker games and the transformation of the apartment from a disordered mare's nest into what looks like a sample room in Better Homes and Gardens. James Minot, Marty Schickler, Ed Stelmach and Charles Pimlott give much laugh release in their fine portrayals of men who want to get away from their families to relax like boys at heart with beer and poker. Schickler is right from life as the hard bitten, street-wise but friendly cop.

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RUSS RISMAN'S set the living room of an eight room apartment on New York's Riverside Drive is effectively detailed. Just

the transformation of the living room from the Augean Stables of Hercules into the almost sterile atmosphere of an operating room takes a lot of doing.

I swore the next time I had to see ""The Odd Couple" I'd scream. As it was, all I did was laugh.