BUCHANAN’S FINEST HOUR
From the Oxford E.T.C. the team has finally come to Second City E.T.C., thanks to Quando Productions’ staging of Buchanan’s Finest Hour. Written as part of a bill of two one-acts (the other was called Underhill’s Finest Hour), this one-hour comedy apparently has been presented only once before, at its 1976 world premiere at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The reason for the play’s neglect is hard to fathom, given not only the popularity of all things Python-related but also the fact that Buchanan’s Finest Hour is a screaming laugh riot.
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The key to Buchanan’s Finest Hour’s success or failure lies in the voices of the actors–the dynamic gradations, the shifts in tone, the rhythm and volume of their interplay, and of course the fine line between silliness and stupidity in the just-off-kilter accents. Director Kim “Howard” Johnson knows the silly-smart Monty Python style backward and forward–he’s been a friend of the group since he met them in 1975, when he was a college student and they were in Chicago to publicize their film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the anecdote about Michael Palin’s childhood stage debut comes from Johnson’s book The First 200 Years of Monty Python). Letting the simple sight gag of the crates speak for itself, he pays close attention to the actors’ speech; their readings are Python perfection, brimming with hysteria while resolutely maintaining the proprieties of civilized discourse. It helps that for the English characters Johnson has cast two real Englishmen, Roger Smart as Henshaw and Nicholas Cross Wodtke as Harrington; but Tim Glisson as the Frenchman and Sherman Shoemaker as the Italian are equally fine and funny, as is Bill Russell as the bad-taste master of ceremonies who bursts on in the final twist ending to this exceedingly funny play.
